It is still regarded with some suspicion, as it has a tendency to wander from waters which do not altogether suit it.  For the rest, trout have been established in Ceylon, in Kashmir and in South Africa, and early in 1906 an attempt was made to carry them to British Central Africa.  In fact the possibilities of acclimatization are so great that, it seems probable, in time no river of the civilized world capable of holding trout will be without them.

METHODS AND PRACTICE

Angling now divides itself into two main divisions, fishing in fresh water and fishing in the sea.  The two branches of the sport have much in common, and sea-angling is really little more than an adaptation of fresh-water methods to salt-water conditions.  Therefore it will not be necessary to deal with it at great length and it naturally comes in the second place.  Angling in fresh water is again divisible into three principal parts, fishing on the surface, i.e. with the fly; in mid-water, i.e. with a bait simulating the movements of a small fish or with the small fish itself; and on the bottom with worms, paste or one of the many other baits which experience has shown that fish will take.  With the premise that it is not intended here to go into the minutiae of instruction which may more profitably be discovered in the many works of reference cited at the end of this article, some account of the subdivisions into which these three styles of fishing fall may be given.

Fresh-Water Fishing.

Fly-fishing.—­Fly-fishing is the most modern of them, but it is the most highly esteemed, principally because it is the method par excellence of taking members of the most valuable sporting family of fish, the Salmonidae.  It may roughly be considered under three heads, the use of the “wet” or sunk fly, of the “dry” or floating fly, and of the natural insect.  Of these the first is the most important, for it covers the widest field and is the most universally practised.  There are few varieties of fish which may not either consistently or occasionally be taken with the sunk fly in one of its two forms.  The large and gaudy bunch of feathers, silk and tinsel with which salmon, very large trout, black bass and occasionally other predaceous fish are taken is not, strictly speaking, a fly at all.  It rather represents, if anything, some small fish or subaqueous creature on which the big fish is accustomed to feed and it may conveniently receive the generic name of salmon-fly.  The smaller lures, however, which are used to catch smaller trout and other fish that habitually feed on insect food are in most cases intended to represent that food in one of its forms and are entitled to the name of “artificial flies.”  The dry or floating fly is simply a development of the imitation theory, and has been evolved from the wet fly in course of closer observation of the habits of flies and fish in certain waters.  Both wet and dry fly methods are really a substitute for the third and oldest kind of surface-fishing, the use of a natural insect as a bait.  Each method is referred to incidentally below.