118 NOTES ON FISH AND FISHING. 



summate art, and a science in which there is no " finality/ 

 It may, as indeed it does, sometimes happen that an 

 ignoramus, with most unartisticlike tackle, " the clothes- 

 prop and line style," as it has been called, will hook a 

 big fish, and in a most unartisticlike style, succeed in cap- 

 turing him ; but no one, as a rule, in these days of highly 

 cultivated fish, whether he pursue fly-fishing, spinning, or 

 bottom-fishing, can have a reasonable hope of getting a 

 basket of fish where the water is much fished, unless he 

 have the best and finest of tackle, and be the thorough 

 artist, man of knowledge, experience, and expedients, 

 such as I have sketched the thorough angler to be. Old 

 Isaak would stand but little chance of a prize in a modern 

 " angling sweepstakes " in competition with the ordinary 

 hands of our modern angling clubs, and a London or 

 Sheffield roach angler would any day catch two fish to his 

 one. 



I might say more, and insist with truth that the perfect 

 artistic angler must be an ichthyologist, a naturalist, and 

 particularly an entomologist, so that he may be assisted 

 in his art by his scientific knowledge of flies and other 

 insects he uses in their natural state or imitated from 

 nature, and also of the many varieties of worms, the dif- 

 ference and culture of which would take a long chapter 

 to describe : that he must be a geologist too, in order to 

 know the kinds of flies which may be expected to rise from 

 the different soils of river beds, and the different insects 

 which frequent them : and last, but not least, a meteoro- 

 logist, so that he may know what to expect, and what to 

 do according to the variations of the weather, and be able 

 to account in some measure at least for the capriciousness 

 of fish, which are much affected by atmospheric influences. 



