PREFATORY NOTE. 
eo 
PROBABLY few persons who visited the late International 
Fisheries Exhibition in South Kensington could fail to 
have been ‘struck by the multiplicity, and, to the un- 
initiated, complexity of the engines and appliances used 
in the capture of fish. The observation applies even 
more to the ‘angler’—a generic term that I have a 
special objection to, by the way, but let us say to the 
fisherman who uses a rod—than to the ‘fisherman’ 
proper, whose weapons are net and hand-line, and who 
‘occupies his business in great waters.’ 
In consequence of the growing artfulness of man or 
of fish, or both, angling has come to be nearly as wide 
a field for the specialist as doctoring. Each different 
branch has its own professors, practitioners, and students ; 
and its gospel as preached by apostles, differing often 
widely from one another, and perhaps eventually break- 
ing away altogether from old tradition and founding a 
cult of their own. Thus the late Mr. W. C. Stewart, a 
lawyer of Edinburgh and a ‘famous fisher’ of the North, 
may probably be called the apostle of up-stream fly- 
