EX MORTUA MANU 83 



VI 



EX MORTUA MANU 



For centuries, more than most anglers suspect, we have 

 in the matter of fly dressing been in bondage to the past. 

 The dead hand has been heavy on us. To the newcomer 

 to fly dressing the taking of a trout with the artificial 

 fly seems such a miracle that he is apt to attribute some 

 special virtue to the confection of fur and feather which 

 has done the feat, and he falls to studying the fathers of 

 fly dressing either directly from their works or second-hand 

 through modern pundits, or the experts who derive their 

 knowledge and experience either from the same sources 

 or from the experts before them similarly instructed. 

 Thus the body of angling lore on the subject of artificial 

 flies is almost entirely empirical and traditional, and as 

 every new blunder is carefully enshrined in work after 

 work, it is tainted with every kind of long-perpetuated 

 error and prejudice, and is distant indeed from the 

 natural sources from which it should have directly sprung. 



I have described the trout as " rather a stupid person," 

 and, with an irony more biting than I guessed at the time 

 I wrote, I thanked the powers that had made him so, for 

 otherwise man would be unable to catch him with the fly. 

 I did not at the time mean that angler man was something 

 more than " rather a stupid person," but I say now that 

 if the trout took as long to learn the things that belong 

 to his taking as angler man has done, the word " rather " 

 would be an entirely inadequate qualification for the 

 opprobrious adjective. I speak for myself as for the rest 

 of my craft, from Dame Juliana to the present day. Our 

 faculty for misobserving and for misapprehending the most 

 obvious evidence of our senses would put the most stupid 



