46 
FISHES. 
an apprehensive brain, delicacy in the senses of 
touch and hearing, activity of limb, physical 
endurance, persevering control over impatience, 
vigilant v^atchfulness, are qualifications necessary 
to form the fly-fisher. His amusing and chance- 
ful struggles, teeming with varying excitement, 
are with the strongest, the most active, the most 
courageous, the most beautiful, and the most 
valuable of river fish ; and his instruments of 
victory are formed of materials so slight, and 
some of them so frail, — they are beautiful as well, 
— that all the delicacy and cunning resources of 
art, are requisite to enable feebleness to over- 
come force. The large, vigorous, nervous Salmon, 
of amazing strength and wonderful agility ; the 
rapid Trout, of darting velocity, hardy, active, 
untiring — whose dying flurry shows almost in- 
domitable resistance — are hooked, held in, 
wearied out, by the skilful and delicate manage- 
ment of tackle that would, if rudely handled, be 
bent and strained by the strength and weight of 
a Minnow. ’Tis wonderful to see hooks of Lilli- 
putian dimensions, gut finer than hair, and a rod, 
some of whose wooden joints are little thicker 
than a crow’s quill, employed in the capture of 
the very strongest of river fish. The marvel lies 
in the triumph of art over brute force. If the 
sporting gear of the fly-fisher were not managed 
with art, on the mathematical principles of 
leverage, he could not, by its means, lift from the 
ground more than a minute fraction of the dead 
weight of that living, bounding, rushing fish, 
which he tires to death, nay drowns, in its own 
element. The overcoming of difficulties by the 
suaviter in modo forms one of the greatest charms 
