226 FISHING GOSSIP. 
with salmon battwes, would of course look upon the 
moderate fishing of the Dee as “stale, flat, and un- 
profitable.” . For minds so diseased, the costly, though 
not always productive preserves of Scotland, or the 
yet unexhausted fjords of Northern Europe, can alone 
administer the suitable remedy. Failing these, there 
is yet balm in Gilead for heroic Waltonians—a berth 
in the next whaler from Peterhead or Aberdeen, and 
a run amongst the virgin streams flowing into the 
Polar basin. Happy the angler, who, deaf to the 
seductions of ambition and the despotism of fashion, 
can betake himself to some unhackneyed stream 
amongst the hills, or modestly flowing between ranks 
of meadow-sweet and flag-iris in the plain, and make 
his own skill and the manipulation of his tackle the 
sources of pleasure, not surpassed in the more aspiring 
walks of the art. 
The salmon-fiies in general use on the Dee claim 
that especial adaptation to the locality demanded by 
almost all other rivers. If we are to receive implicitly 
the theories of local fly-dressers, there can be no doubt 
of a distinct centre of creation of flies for every sal- 
mon stream in these islands. Huxley and Owen may 
dispute the problem in the case of man and other — 
animals as long as they like, but in those curious com- 
pounds of pigs’-wool, feathers, and fish-hooks, called 
by courtesy or poetic licence salmon-flies, a separate 
genesis maust be assumed as an established fact. Ac- 
