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Fitzgibbon

Started by Traditionalist, October 26, 2011, 01:26:31 PM

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Traditionalist

A Handbook of Angling By Edward Fitzgibbon 1853


CHAPTER III.
ON ARTIFICIAL FLIES.

MAD MEN AND MAD FISH
OF late years a new doctrine—in my opinion a totally wrong one—has been sent forth about artificial flies. Some Scotch writers were the first promulgators of it, and they have carried it to ridiculous extravagance. They positively maintain that there is no likeness between the natural fly and the artificial one, and that when natural flies are on the water the angler will be more successful by using artificial flies as widely different from them in shape, colour, &c., as may be. A nondescript artificial fly will succeed better, they say, than a bad resemblance, and every attempt at imitation, in their opinion, produces at the best but a bad resemblance. These angling heretics contend that fish rising at a natural fly immediately detect, by comparison of course, the bad imitation, and refuse to rise at it, whereas they will rise at some outlandish artificial that differs, as much as chalk does from Cheshire cheese, from the living fly on the water. They say, that when they go fly-fishing they catch some of these flies that are on the water, and fish with artificial flies totally different from them, and invariably meet with more success than if they used so-called, as they name them, imitations.

The majority of mankind are mad on one subject or another. Perhaps the majority of animals are similarly so. I deem these fly-fishers mad, and think them successful because they meet with mad fish, more readily taken with fantastic flies than with naturally coloured and shaped ones. That is the only way I can account for the former's heterodoxy. My friends, do not mind what these cracked sectarians say. They are learned philosophers, writing articles on "Angling" in ponderous encyclopaedias, from visionary data, but we are lowly scatterers of information gathered by the waterside. We grant that there is very great difficulty in imitating, by means of feathers, fur, wool, &c., the water-insects fish feed upon, but we maintain that a fair deceptive imitation can be made, and that it is beyond all comparison more attractive to fish than no imitation at all. We contend that the less imperfect an imitation, the more attractive will it be found in fishing. Let any impartial judge examine the artificial flies made by Mr. Blacker, of 54. Dean Street, Soho, and then say whether his imitations are fair ones or not.

We said that philosophers,—naturalists with barnacles on nose,—reading insect nature through the glass-cases of museums, find, they assert, no likeness whatsoever between the natural fly and what, to the vulgar, appears the best artificial imitation ever dressed. The microscope, they cry, proves this. An unjaundiced human eye proves quite another thing. The eyes of birds are, I believe, pretty good. At any rate they can see at an immense distance. The philosophers will perhaps allow that the eyes of the feathered tribes are as difficult to be deceived as those of the finny tribes. I should say more so, because their eyes are sharpened by something very like an intelligent brain placed close by them. Well, birds are continually deceived by the artificial fly of the angler. Swallows, martins, swifts, goldfinches, have darted at artificial flies as the wind blew them about on the line, and have hooked themselves and been taken. About six years ago a dunghill cock seized an artificial May-fly attached to an angler's rod resting outside an inn at Buxton, and was hooked. If birds take these imitations of water-flies, not being their natural or best food, how can it be argued that fish will not take them? ..................................
   

Traditionalist

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