SUNDRY OBSERVATIONS 141 



Flies and Sunk Flies." That chapter is written with the 

 fair-mindedness and intellectual honesty which charac- 

 terizes everything that came from his pen. And yet I 

 think I detect in that chapter, and in that volume, much 

 that has lent support to the tendency of thought which 

 we are inquiring into. It was there argued at considerable 

 length and with much acuteness that on chalk streams the 

 wet fly does not pay, that the dry fly is successful on these 

 streams when the sunk fly is utterly hopeless. It is not 

 suggested that it is wicked to use the wet fly, only that 

 it is ineffectual. But, in order to test this argument, it is 

 necessary to see what Mr. F. M. Halford meant by the 

 wet fly. Let me quote his exact words : 



" The sunk fly is an imitation of the larva, or nymph, 

 moving in the water, or of a winged insect when water- 

 logged or drowned. . . . 



" With the sunk or wet fly he (the angler) casts to a 

 likely place, whether he has or has not seen a rise there 

 (more frequently he has not), and, in fact, his judgment 

 should tend to tell him where, from his knowledge of the 

 habits of the fish, they are most likely to be found in 

 position or likely to feed. Thus wet-fly fishing is often 

 termed ' fishing the water/ in contradistinction to the 

 expression ' fishing the rise,' which is applied to the method 

 of the dry-fly fisherman." 



Mr. Halford, therefore, understood wet-fly fishing as fish- 

 ing at large all over the water as against fishing the rise. 

 Would he at that time have objected (had it occurred to him 

 to do so) to a wet-fly fisherman confining himself to fishing 

 the rise, or the located fish, with the wet fly ? I can 

 hardly think so. He was more open-minded than that. He 

 said, in the same chapter which I have quoted : 



" Some dry-fly fishermen are such purists that they will 

 not, under any circumstances whatever, make a single cast 



