232 PIKE AND OTHER COARSE FISH. 



Others' again recommend the worliing up with it of a certain 

 quantity of cotton wool to make it adhere longer to the hook. 

 Honey is another addition which is often- strongly advocated. 

 I cannot say, however, that I have personally found any 

 necessity for or advantage in these various refinements, and I 

 am disposed to think that a good clean white bread paste made 

 in the way that I have described will generally take, when fish 

 are taking at all, at least as well as any other variation. 



A sort of composite bait which has been recommended 

 on really good authority is made by putting a gentle on the 

 point of the hook and covering the rest of the shank with 

 paste. Mr. Davies, the accomplished author of a charming 

 book on 'Fishing in the Norfolk Broads,' states that in his 

 experience a paste and gentle bait thus concocted has been 

 known to kill where no success attended the use of paste 

 alone. 



Cheese paste — i.e. ordinary cheese worked up into a paste — 

 is also a bait which has been recommended as deadly for 

 carp and barbel. That' it is so for chub — used with a float 

 in the ' Nottingham style,' under boughs, &c., and in pellets 

 about the size of a cherry — I can confidently assert, but I have 

 not tried it myself for any other fisL The cheese I have used 

 has also been always comparatively • new, whereas to select a 

 cheese that ' stinks ' is the advice of experts. 



There is, in fact, no end to the nostrums with which writers 

 on fishing would complicate our bait-box. They almost all, 

 however, depend, as pointed out in an amusing article by 'G. F.,' 

 published in the ' Fisherman's Magazine,' some years ago, upon 

 tittivating the olfactory fisn nerves, and this again depends upon 

 fish being possessed of the sense of smell, which may be assumed 

 by analogy, but I don't think has ever been demonstrated ichthyo- 

 logically. Admitting, however, that in fish as in man, the nose 

 may be ' the sentinel of the stomach,' it is hard to believe that it 

 could receive with pleasure such a compound as the following, 

 recommended by M. Charras to Louis XIV., King of France, 

 as an infallible ' anointment for fish bait : 



