102 FLY FISHING FOE TEOUT. 



pletely at this early stage : it shows surely that 

 the question was no new one : it must have been 

 discussed by anglers and argued long and often 

 at the waterside when fish were not rising. 

 Venables sums up in favour of downstream fish- 

 ing, except in small brooks, but the point to 

 notice is not the actual decision he comes to but 

 the evidence he affords that upstream fishing 

 was understood and practised. 



So profound is the influence of upstream 

 fishing that it is wor£h while spending time in 

 tracing its continuous history from Venables 

 who starts it in 1662 to Stewart's Practical 

 Angler in 1857, after which it was never 

 seriously questioned. This is all the more 

 necessary, as its history has been misunder- 

 stood, for the ordinary fisherman if asked who 

 started upstream fishing would probably answer 

 Stewart, whereas as a matter of fact it was 

 both developed and described two centuries 

 earlier. In order to trace its course I propose 

 to select eighteen of the best writers on fly 

 fishing between 1662 and 1857 and to see what 

 they said, choosing six who wrote in the seven- 

 teenth century, six in the eighteenth, and six 

 during the first half of the nineteenth, or rather 

 before 1857, when Stewart wrote. They are 

 chosen impartially, as the best authorities, not 

 because they favour one school or the other. 



Who shall be chosen? For the seventeenth 

 century the choice is not difiicult. Franck, 



