CURIOSITIES OF ANGLING LITERATURE 245 
CURIOSITIES OF ANGLING 
LITERATURE. 
AS we explore retrogressively, and dive deep into the 
mysteries of old books upon Natural History, so do 
we find how the flood of light which is now poured 
by the lamp of scientific research upon all things 
animate and inanimate dwindles gradually to a more 
minute spark : and curious it is to reflect that that 
little ray, penetrating in times past through only a 
narrow crevice, or peeping modestly out of the 
chamber of literature through its well-nigh closed 
shutters, was the parent of the great living TRUTH, 
which in these latter days finds nothing too low and 
nothing too high for its shining, and which by the 
aid of the telescope and the microscope has left but 
little unrevealed, or at least unexamined, whether of 
things on the earth, or things under the earth, or 
things over the earth. The books we have been re- 
cently plodding through date from 1600 to 1740, and 
these show how, for the most part, truth and error 
were unwittingly, and as we might almost say con- 
scientiously, woven together. 
In the course of our search we have chanced upon 
