FOREWORD 



Authorities darken counsel. An authority is a person 

 engaged in the invidious business of stereotyping and 

 disseminating information, frequently incorrect. Angling 

 literature teems with examples. I imagine that few 

 anglers have devoted more time than I have to the study 

 of authorities. From Dame Juliana to the latest issue 

 of the press there is scarcely a book on trout-fly dressing 

 and trout fishing which I have not studied and ana- 

 lyzed, and this conclusion seems to me inevitable. It 

 was not until I realized this that my reading became 

 any use to me. Up to that point I had been swallowing 

 wholesale, with my facts, all sorts of fallacies and inac- 

 curacies, alike in the matter of dressings and their use, 

 and what they were intended to represent. From that 

 point on an author became merely a suggester of experiment 

 — a means of testing and checking my own observations 

 by the water side, and no longer a small god to be believed 

 in and trusted as infallible. And that is all an author, 

 writing on any progressive art or science, ought to be. 

 It is good now and again to have the ideas and discoveries 

 of an epoch analyzed in the crucible of some acute intellect, 

 and the problem restated, but this age has put an end to all 

 belief in finality, and the business of that analysis should 

 be to clear away the lumber of the past, while preserving 

 all that is of value, and not to add more than can be helped 

 to the lumber that some later writer will strive — probably 

 in vain — to clear away. An authority who lays down a 

 law and dogmatizes is a narcotic, a soporific, a stupefier, an 

 opiate. The true function of an authority is to stimulate, 

 not to paralyze, original thinking. But then, I suppose, he 

 wouldn't be an authority. 



Since the very beginning of things men have talked fish 

 and fishing, just as they have talked religion and metaphysics, 



ix b 



