2 SALMON AND TROUT. 
creel, and, for that matter, his pockets and his wading boots, 
with the unsuspecting fario, which came up gaily to his flies, 
three or four at a time, in blissful ignorance and apparently 
undiminished numbers. Such spots, however, are becoming 
rarer year by year. Even the most sequestered waters are now 
sought after, and generally found out, by the indefatigable 
tourist or the lessees of the sporting rights ; and the inhabitants 
of such waters, however unwilling to be taught, are receiving 
the benefits of a sort of ‘compulsory education’ that is gra- 
dually opening their eyes to several little things going on in 
the wicked world around, with which it is to their advantage to 
be acquainted. 
There are, of course, and probably always will be, degrees 
of advancement in ‘trout knowledge.’ The streams of Scotland 
and Ireland can never, in our time at least, be fished to the 
same extent as those of England, and especially of our southern 
counties. And it is very fortunate that it should be so, for 
many a man whose trout-fishing experience has been attained 
principally amongst the Scotch and Irish lakes and rivers, 
and who, not unnaturally, perhaps, considers himself a highly 
artistic performer, would be literally ‘nowhere’ if suddenly 
transferred with the same tackle and mode of fishing to the 
banks of the Itchen, the Test, or the Driffield Beck. Instead 
of finding comparatively few trout and those under-fed, and 
predisposed to at least regard his lure with a friendly eye, he 
would see a water literally teeming with pampered and, there- 
fore, highly fastidious, fish, whom his first appearance on the 
bank sent flying in a dozen different directions, and who, when 
his saturated nondescript did happen to pass over their noses, 
moved not a responsive muscle, and by their attitude conveyed 
the general idea of what Lord Randolph Churchill would call 
ineradicable superciliousness. . . 
But these are the products of ‘ centuries of civilisation,’ and 
the ultimate outcome of the theory of the survival of the fittest. 
In regard to salmon as well as trout the principle of the 
‘higher education’ also holds good, although not quite in the 
