Page:Natural History, Fishes.djvu/60

46 an apprehensive brain, delicacy in the senses of touch and hearing, activity of limb, physical endurance, persevering control over impatience, vigilant watchfulness, are qualifications necessary to form the fly-fisher. His amusing and chanceful 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 overcome 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 indomitable resistance—are hooked, held in, wearied out, by the skilful and delicate management 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 Lilliputian 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