Dec. 31, 1910 ] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
1071 
THE ANGLER OLD AND NEW. 
The recent announcement that a British 
amateur fly- and bait-casting club has been 
formed in London, with the later intelligence 
that its members number already nearly a hun¬ 
dred, is eloquent of a good deal more than the 
mere fact which it makes known; it marks a 
new phase in the" history of angling in this 
country. So far, though public interest in fly- 
and bait-casting has not been lacking, English 
efforts to support and popularize it have been 
sporadic and intermittent. A certain number 
of international tournaments have been held, 
each involving a new effort, committee, and 
apparatus, and some of the angling clubs have 
held competitions on their own account, but, 
despite the success that has attended such ex¬ 
hibitions, and the pleasure that both performers 
and spectators have had out of them, the logical 
development has been long in coming. Mean¬ 
while the United States, with its zeal for all new 
things, has made casting clubs a commonplace 
of its’ piscatorial life and works. It is not 
wholly surprising that we should be “way back’’ 
in this respect;, festina lente is a motto approved 
by the Englishman. And it is not as though 
Great Britain had not proved her mettle. The 
late John Enright, sincerely regretted by all 
who knew him, was no mean champion, and he 
has successors, both amateur and professional, 
who can hold their own. With the foundation 
of the new club an impetus to achievement will 
certainly be given. 
It is permissible to wonder what Izaak Wal¬ 
ton would have thought of it all if, journeying 
one “fine fresh May morning” to the banks of 
Lea or Thames, he had come upon some brave 
company like that assembled in the Stadium 
last summer, and had seen the casting of flies 
and baits with the tools now employed. It is 
certain that the dear old man would have been 
fain to rub his eyes over marvels not to be 
matched even in the times of the learned 
Gesner. Walton would probably have extended 
sympathetic hearing to the tale told somewhat 
later by Nicholas Cox of the fish “in the perfect 
shape of a man,” which lived on dry land in 
Suffolk for above half a year, and which “was 
often led to church, but never showed any sign 
of adoration”; but the sight of modern rods 
and reels, the proof of what modern anglers 
can do with them, would surely have been too 
much for his credulity. Intrinsically, of course, 
fishing to-day is very much what it was- when 
Walton wrote what it was, indeed, when Homer 
likened the predatory methods of Scylla to the 
behavior of a fisherman with a long rod letting 
his bait down to the sea from the rocks above. 
We still essay to delude fishes with a bait and 
a long rod. Sometimes that bait is a highly 
developed artifice, the delicate imitation of a 
fragile insect, but even so we have to go far 
back to antiquity to find the pioneers. It is at 
least fifteen hundred years since Ailian noted 
that the Macedonians used flies upon the river 
Astrseus. There has, in truth, been no change 
in essentials, but only developments. Where 
the change has been is in the mind of the 
angler, in the spirit in which he approaches his 
pastime, and in the way of a man with a fish. 
It seems certain that Greece took no account 
of fishing as a sport. The most vivid fishing 
scene presented to us in its literature, the 
twenty-first Idyll of Theocritus, describes the 
dream-capture of a huge golden fish, and the 
fisherman displays very proper emotions of 
hope and fear and delight; but it must be owned 
that he displays them not because the fish is 
huge, but because it is golden. Egypt, it may 
be, fished for sport to some extent; Cleopatra, 
at any rate, has the credit of ideas on the sub¬ 
ject. And Imperial Rome may well have plied 
the rod for occasional diversion. But we have 
little clue to the mental attitude of the ancients 
toward the art, and small knowledge even of 
mediaeval opinion. Not till late in the fifteenth 
century do we get definite evidence of the fact 
that fishing was then, and presumably had long 
been, a pastime worthy of attention. With the 
Treatyse of Fysshynge begins, so to speak, the 
modern era, and from 1496 we can trace changes 
and developments. 
Love for the sport, while it has greatly in- • 
creased, has not altered in kind. It is still the 
angler’s modest belief that he is a good, peace¬ 
able man, a very honest man and not without 
mental qualities beyond the common, all as part 
and parcel of his character as angler. He does 
not insist so much as did his ancestors on 
scriptural warrant—within such unexpected 
covers as those of Sir William Waller’s Divine 
Meditations, 1682, may be found I pages on 
angling—but he is no less emphatic on the 
moral and physical benefits to be derived from 
quiet hours by the water side. Alteration, how¬ 
ever, there has been in the way of regarding 
the sport. Our forefathers, it must be con¬ 
fessed, included many dubious methods in their 
plan of campaign. The pike, in particular, was 
singled out for such attack as would now be 
only employed against him by a zealous keeper 
on a trout stream. Recipes for stupefying 
roach, dace, and the like were given in many 
books, and - in some may be found careful in¬ 
structions for the use of salmon roe, a bait on 
which the law now bends an uncompromising 
frown. It may be that those old anglers did 
not find fish so confiding as we are sometimes 
disposed to think, and that the crudeness of 
their tackle may have militated against too 
great success; perhaps they had no need to 
limit the weight of their catches, as we have on 
so many waters, because they did not in effect 
catch too much. Also, of course, they were 
few in number as compared with the great army 
that follows the sport to-day. Still the fact 
remains that they approved many things which 
are now of necessity banned, and they looked 
on fishing with other eyes. It is only some 
fifty years since W. C. Stewart estimated the 
weight of trout which a man should kill in any 
county in the south of Scotland, on almost any 
day from May to October, as twelve pounds. 
That would be a fine basket once or twice in 
the season nowadays, and such success coming 
to all anglers at all times would be unthinkable. 
It would also be inadmissible, since the streams 
would very soon be swept bare, and the angler’s 
occupation would be gone. Fortunately, trout 
are fairly well able to take care of themselves 
now on the border and similar streams, while 
in the south they receive a good deal of protec¬ 
tion beyond that which native intelligence 
affords them; limit of size and number is a very 
usual precaution, and there is also in their 
favor the disposition of the ordinary man to 
be content wtih modest results. Now and then 
no doubt he rejoices over some great day, but 
as a general rule the chalk-stream fisherman is 
well pleased with a brace or tvC^, and desires 
no more. 
The chief difference between ourselves and 
our forefathers is, in fact, that their sport was 
natural while ours is to a considerable extent 
artificial, not in itself—for no one has ever 
found or will find any certain way of persuading 
a fish to take a bait—but in -our treatment of 
it. We limit ourselves that our pleasure, may 
be the more certain and enduring. We aim at 
giving the fish the sporting chance worthy of 
respected foes. There is a pleasant story of a 
member of a famous fishing club which illus¬ 
trates this. With a dry fly he hooked the trout 
of a lifetime, a monster of some seven pounds. 
The fish, surprised and indignant, did an un¬ 
expected thing. It leaped straight ashore, and 
the battle was over ere it had begun. But the 
chivalrous angler was not going to take so 
mean an advantage of an obvious mistake. He 
gently returned the fish to the stream, resumed 
the rod, fought the battle, and—lost it! This 
is perhaps sportsmanship in excelsis, but it is 
symbolical of the modern habit of mind. The 
tendency is undoubtedly good, as is its accom¬ 
paniment, the limitation of .method. If men 
were to use Alexandras and similar lures on the 
chalk streams they might have heavier baskets 
for a time (trout soon get to know and distrust 
such deceits), but they would certainly lose their 
own pleasure, for the essence of chalk-stream 
fishing is to catch large trout with a small, fly, 
a difficult and fascinating art. Of course, limi¬ 
tation of method might be carried too far; the 
man who set himself to catch Thames trout 
and their likes with small dry flies and nothing 
else would be on a quest worthy of Don 
Quixote. But considered in the light of com¬ 
mon sense the philosophy is sound. And it 
leads to yet another thing. If you cleave to one 
method for a river or kind of fish it is essential 
that you should acquire all possible skill in it. 
Here is where the establishment of fly- and 
bait-casting as an accompaniment of angling 
comes in. Recent years have shown that rods 
and reels have greatly improved as a result of 
tournaments and public interest in them, and 
there can be little doubt that many men have 
learnt a good deal that is useful with regard to 
the manipulation both of fly and spinning rods, 
and that they have since had more pleasure in 
their sport for that learning. As an instance, 
if but a few anglers (they are probably many) 
have been moved to learn how to cast a spin¬ 
ning bait from the reel in consequence of watch¬ 
ing Mr. Emery or some other expert, much pleas¬ 
ure has been communicated from man to man. 
It is well that casting should be conducted with 
an eye on fishing rather than on distance 
records, and that accuracy and delicacy of 
achievement should be properly valued. This 
the new body has as its special aim, and we 
may be sure that tests of and lessons in skill 
will not be neglected. As for other advantages, 
the new phase in angling history has not a few. 
An opportunity for using his beloved rod, even 
where no fish are, will not come amiss to an 
angler in the dead time of year, while the so- 
ciety of his fellows, the talk of past delights 
and hopes for the future—these things are not 
to be despised. On the whole meditation on 
Walton’s views ends in the belief , that, did he 
know our modern conditions of life, could he 
follow the developments that have taken place, 
he would cease from rubbing his venerable 
eyes and would describe the brave company s 
proceedings as “excellent good. The Field. 
NORWAY’S TIMBER SUPPLY. 
The Norwegian authorities are somewhat ap¬ 
prehensive on account of the increasing im¬ 
portation of fir and pine timber by owners of 
wood-pulp mills. It is looked upon as an indi¬ 
cation that the forests of the country are being 
drawn upon beyond their capacity, and this in 
spite of very liberal public and private outlay 
for tree planting and the enactment of forestry 
laws in most of the wooded districts. 
The forestry laws of Norway regulating the 
usage of the forests and the size of trees that 
may be lawfully felled for any purpose other 
than the owner’s private use, and not for sale, 
are different in the several communities and are 
iormed to meet the requirements and wishes 
of the people themselves. For this reason trees 
not much larger than saplings may lawfully be 
felled in some tracts, while only fair-sized trees 
may be felled in others. 
Tree planting, says Consul-General Borde- 
wich, of Christiania, is carried on systematically 
by the State, by counties, and by private per¬ 
sons, but it is stated on good authority that 
from the time of planting it takes twenty-five 
years for a tree to reach 12 inches m diameter 
at the butt in the most favorable localities in the 
South, while it takes fifty years, or more in 
tracts in the North where planting is at all 
possible. Even in the southern part of the 
country it takes seventy-five to one hundred 
years for a pine tree to yield timbers 25 feet in 
length and 9 to 10 inches in diameter at the 
top. Planted trees are claimed to be self-seed¬ 
ing when thirty years old. Owing to the 
broken and hilly condition of. most timber lands 
in Norway it is often found impossible to start 
new growth by planting, as heavy rains wash 
away the seedlings. 
Importation of material. for the pulp mills 
was first tried in 1907. The import had reached 
12,800 cubic meters the next year, and in 1909 
it had increased to 65,400 cubic meters, valued 
at $362,000. The timber is imported from ports 
in Finland and Russia. 
Another reason for doubting the endurance 
of the forests is the fact that the export of 
lumber is fast decreasing. 
