tioned, and here we are fishing through binoculars in five steps. Have patience. These things unfold themselves slowly.
One more stage, and the supereminent is just beyond. Sport is, after all, only the handmaid of natural history. It is good to seek healthy recreation, but it is better to serve humanity. The pursuit of birds, beasts, and fishes is in itself an end to lower natures. Yet there is a savagery about it which must revolt the Thinker. To know—that is the highest object of man's energy; and to know the trout aright we must know on what he feeds. The angler, then, to whom I would now direct your attention, having mastered the things that the fish of his chosen study does, turns his mind to the things that it eats. He moves on by one other degree towards perfection. He catches flies.
Lastly—and here I reach the supreme point to which (so far as I know) the science of dry-fly fishing has attained—lastly is found the all-knowing fisherman who, abandoning rod, creel, waders, trout, flies, and river as matters which no longer concern the investigator, occupies his angling hours in the loving study of the habits of the birds. Beyond this I do not think fishing can go. Yet mathematicians tell us that there is a fourth dimension of existence inconceivable to common
