HOOKS. 1g 
speaking, can be imported into a hook. And yet they are 
taken, facstmile, from a hook-maker’s catalogue (I forbear to 
give the name), as illustrations, it is to be presumed, of what 
in his opinion hooks ought to be! If one of these abortions, 
say No. 4 or 5 ‘needle point,’ so called, were attached to gut 
and the point pulled in the ordinary way against a piece of 
cork—which represents fairly well the inside of a fish’s mouth 
—I doubt very much if it could by any possibility be made 
to penetrate ; the -hook-point would, in. fact, strike the fish’s 
mouth vertically instead of horizontally. 
If it should appear that I am attaching undue importance 
to minute details, let it be borne in mind that ‘the whole art 
and paraphernalia of angling have for their objects, first, to 
hook fish, and, secondly, to keep them hooked.’ The differ- 
ence in the penetrating powers alone of different bends of 
hooks is something enormous ; between the extremes of good- 
ness-and badness (I am not speaking now of ‘monstrosities ’) 
it amounts to certainly not Zess than a hundred per cent. 
TROUT HOOKS. 
Eyed Hooks for trout flies, and the general idea of attaching 
them to the end of the casting line direct, are not, as already 
pointed out, in any correct sense of the term novelties, eyed 
hooks having been alluded to as early as Hawker’s edition of 
‘“Walton’s Angler,’ /emp. 1760. No great attention, however, 
appears to have been paid to the subject of Eyed Trout-hooks 
until comparatively recent times, when the question—confined, 
at the particular period to which I am referring, to turn-up 
eyes—was ventilated at considerable length in the columns of 
the Fie/d and the ishing Gazette by Mr. Hall. This was 
followed in the latter journal by a lively controversy on ‘needle- 
eyed’ hooks, initiated by myself ; and finally I invented, and 
published, the turn-down eyed hook, of which so much has 
since been written, for and against, by acta of the old 
and the new schools. 
c2 
