84 THE WAY OF A TROUT WITH A FLY 



trout to shame. The most caustic phrases of " A Scottish 

 Fly fisher " would be quite too weak to convey any idea of 

 the wrong-headed density of the whole string of writers 

 of fly fishing from A to Z, not excluding the present scribe. 

 From the word " go " fly dressers have built their flies 

 upon the assumption that the winged fly, as seen in the 

 air, is the food of the trout. For generations anglers have 

 fished these winged flies under the surface, because they 

 found the trout would take them there, and it was diffi- 

 cult to make them float. All sorts of ingenious and fanci- 

 ful theories were conceived to account for the taking 

 of winged flies under water. It took a peasant, whose 

 entire education cost, if his preface may be believed, no 

 more than thirty shillings,* to put first on record — though 

 not without some natural errors of observation — that the 

 trout takes the insect at the bottom, and as it ascends to 

 the surface, as well as on the surface, but even he did 

 not advocate imitating it in the subaqueous stages. It 

 took nearly fifty years more to bring us our " Detached 

 Badger," with his autopsies proving that the vast bulk of 

 the food of the trout was subaqueous; that, as he puts 

 it somewhere (I quote from memory), the under- water 

 feeding is the beef and mutton, the floating fly is caviare to 

 the trout, and he authoritatively squelched in Chapter VII. 

 of " Dry-Fly Fishing " the idea that larvae or nymphs 

 could be successfully imitated. Hence his demonstration 

 that chalk-stream fish could only be taken with caviare. 

 It took twenty years more to bring me to the definite 

 conclusion that the wet fly had a big future on chalk 

 streams. And it took the droughty summer of 19 n (with 

 scarce a natural dun or spinner on the surface day by 

 day, yet with trout after trout breaking the surface as it 

 fed in all respects as if it were taking floaters, and every 



* John Younger, "River Angling," 1840. 



