Page 35, line 8, for lace, read Laced.
Page 99, line 8, for falshood, read falsehood.
[TREATISE]
ON
FLY-FISHING.
I am induced to offer the following pages to the youthful aspirant after piscatory fame, from the belief, that the various treatises, which have appeared from time to time on Fly-Fishing, do not contain those minute details, which are so essential to the ready acquirement of the art, and which are generally learnt by slow degrees; either from some experienced angler, or by the accidental discovery of the noviciate.
My chief object however, is to furnish the sportsman, who for the first time is about to wet his line in the west, with a list of flies; which, for a period of twenty years, I have found the most effective, in the Rivers of Devon and Cornwall. I have no doubt, they would be equally successful in Somerset, in the smaller Rivers of Wales, and in some of the Irish Lakes; but, as I cannot vouch from personal experience, I must leave to others the task of testing their more general application.
My remarks are restricted to Fly-Fishing; partly, because I hold this to be the most skilful and pleasing of the various ways by which man secures the wily fish; and also, from the length to which this paper would extend, if I were to enlarge on the numerous other devices adopted to entrap the finny tribe.
Worms, kill-devils, salmon-roe, minnows, cock-chafers, &c. &c. &c., are to be met with in the catalogue of the fisherman’s stock in trade; and, if we extend our researches to distant climes, we find even birds are classed among the fishing implements.