FISHES AND FISHING.*
Mn. PENNELL'S aim has been to write a work which shall be equally acceptable to the novice and the veteran in the good old art of angling. The difficulty of such a design lies in the inevitable risk of wearying the experienced man while instructing the raw hand. In reading Walton's book, we are simply unconscious of the existence of any such difficulty, so completely did he conquer, or rather elude, it. But Mr. Pennell's lessons are more elementary than Walton's, and when we found him explaining that " branchi 93" is Latin for gills, and that "fishes form the fourth or lowest class * The dagler-Naturolist. A Popular History of British Fresh-water Fish. with a Plain Explanation of the Rudiments of Iethyology. By II. Cholmondeley Pennell. London: T. Van VooraL 18C3. of vertebrate animals (i. e., animals possessing a back-bone)," we felt a misgiving that the work was intended for thtise anglers only who prey upon the stickleback with pieces of thread and crooked pins. After the first fourth of the book, however, we get into deeper water. It is sometimes a good plan to begin at the beginning, and it is possible that there are some disciples of the
gentle art who stand in need of such information as Mr. Pennell gently feeds them with at the outset. Even that dearest of preceptors, Piscator, sometimes stopped the supply of solid food, and treated his docile scholar with a spoonful of pap—and Venator was thankful for it, from the respect he bore to the hand which carried the spoon to his mouth. Mr. Pennell deserves no worse treatment. He has a great deal to say that is extremely well worth bearing, and if he does explain that the word vertebrate refers to the back- bone, he compensates for it by telling some good storks of fish he or his friends have caught. His occasional hints to anglers are also well thought of, judicious, and likely to prove useful. And he has suggested a knife,—it can be made for 12s. 13d.— which all brothers of the rod will do well to have in their pockets when they go out fishing, and if they put Mr. Pennell's book in another pocket they will add to the enjoyment of the expe- dition.
The habits of fresh-water fish have been so well studied in this country, that our information respecting them is now ap- parently almost complete ; but additional observations are always useful, and sometimes they are found to throw a con- siderable light on points which we bad been led to consider settled and done with. The good angler is an observant, re- flective man, and the craft being a very brotherly one, a con- stant interchange of ideas and discoveries is ever going on. That interesting paper, the Field, has been of the greatest service in providing for naturalists the means of carrying on a regular correspondence with each other, and a vast number of curious anecdotes have consequently been told for the first time in its columns. Anglers are lovers of peace, as Walton says, but, nevertheless, they are not above dis- puting warmly with each other as to the value of their respective stories, and as to the inferences to be drawn from them. This partly arises from the enthusiasm with which they go about their occupation—an enthusiasm almost equal to that which once lost an excellent angler a wife. He was a clergyman living near Hampton Court, and was engaged to be married to a bishop's daughter. But on the day appointed for the ceremony he unfortunately went out gudgeon-fishing, and stayed till it was too late to be married, whereat the lady was so incensed that she discarded him for ever, and sent him back to his favourite pond with ignominy and scorn. Perhaps he found consolation there greater than he could have derived even from a wife, although a bishop's daughter into the bargain—and yet to lose a wife for the sake of a gudgeon was, undoubtedly, a very noble act of devotion to a sport, if it was predetermined. There are not many anglers who would have been capable of such fidelity to the rod and the line.
Few of the special points on which information has thus been ac- cumulated are more curious than the voracity of many kinds of fish. Fish, as a rule, seem to be able to digest anything, and to digest with wonderful rapidity. Having once taken their food they are never troubled with it afterwards—a condition which is as near an approach to bliss as can be easily imagined. An angler once caught a pike which had a large eel sticking in its throat. The head portion "was actually swallowed and partly digested, whilst the tail, still alive and twisting, protruded from the jaws." The old fable of the ostrich being able to digest iron was not so surprising as this authenticated fact. The pike might have got rid of the other half of the eel, but the greed of the fish is so insatiable that it will eat till it is obliged to disgorge, and then again bolt what it has disgorged. The perch is bad enough in this respect. It is not frightened away by seeing its companions taken out of the water by the angler. As some one whom Walton quotes remarked, "If there be twenty or forty in a hole, they may be at one standing all catched one after another, they being, like the wicked of the world, not afraid though their fellows and companions perish in their sight." Perch have been taken so gorged with minnows that the tails of some partially masticated stuck out of their gullets. Mr. Pennell once caught a perch with its own cye—tho most extraordinary bait that ever an angler got a " rise " out of. In removing the hook from a perch, Mr. Pennell accidentally tore out its eye, and threw the fish into the water again. Being short of bait he threw the line in with the eye on the hook. "The float," he states, "disappeared almost instantly, and on landing the new comer, it turned out to be the fish I had the
moment before thrown in." It had evidently felt very little pain or inconvenience from the loss of its unrecognized organ. The pike is, probably, a greater glutton than the perch. It will eat almost anything, and it cannot have too much to eat. It will consume about twice its own weight of fish every week; eight of them devoured nearly 800 gudgeon in three weeks, and Mr.
Pennell does not think much of this feat, but believes that the poor half-starved pike could have eaten many more if they had been in the way. A jack will swallow watches, spoons, lead—anything, in fact, that happens to come first. He will eat his companions without the faintest sign of a qualm. Here is a startling anecdote as an example :—A Mr.
L---, of Chippenham, Wiltshire, "set a trimmer in the river Avon over night, and on proceeding the next morning to take it sip he found a heavy pike apparently fast on his hooks. In order to extract these he was obliged to open the fish, and in doing so perceived another pike of considerable size inside the first, from the mouth of which the line proceeded. This fish it was also
found necessary to open, when, extraordinary to state, a third
pike, of about I lb. weight, and already partly digested, was dis- covered in the stomach of the second. This last fish was, of course, the original taker of the bait, having been itself sub- sequently pouched by a later comer, to be, in its turn also, after- wards seized and gorged." We have heard many wonderful stories of the pike, but they will bear no comparison with this.
There was one, however, which distinguished itself in another way. It saw a boy bathing in a pond near Ascot Heath, and liking the look of the provender, it snapped at the lad and took a firm grip of his hand. With the other arm the boy beat it off, and tried to get back to shore ; but the fish pursued him, and in- flicted several severe wounds on his body. A few days after- wards the fish was found floating on the surface of the water quite dead, not poisoned by the boy, but simply killed with hunger. How it got to the pond is not stated—perhaps it travelled overland, as the pike and other fish will sometimes do. Nothing subdues the courage of this fish. A jack once seized a fox by the nose, in a large tank, and when the fox was shot the pike would not loose its hold, but was drawn to land with it and captured. It fights gallantly against the otter, and even against the eagle, sometimes dragging the latter beneath the surface of the water and drowning it.
The sense of hearing in fish is very curious. Any one who has walked by the side of a well-stocked river must have observed how the fish will glide away from the banks, even though the intruder is in such a position that he cannot be seen. The Chinese, as Yarrell says, breed gold-fish to come for their food at the call of a whistle ; and similar experiments have been made in England. A gentleman kept a perch which would come to the top of the water whenever he was called, and Mr. Pennell relates a curious freak of three carp in his vivatium. When the bell is rung for family prayers they begin "springing and splashing about in the water, continuing their efforts for five or ten minutes, with a noise and vivacity exceedingly distracting to the attention, and in the highest degree indecorous." Carp, by the bye, are not easy fish to land. They have the pro- voking trick of springing over the top of a net, and when they see a net in the water they bury themselves in the sand at the bottom, so that it cannot reach them.
The azuriue, or blue roach, is remarkable for its attachment to one particular locality—the neighbourhood of Knowsley. It is small, but is said to be of good flavour. But there are few fish in this country whose method of getting food is calculated to excite much astonishment. The cheetodon of India, on the other hand, goes to work in a wonderful way. When it sees a fly upon a leaf or a bush, it 'brings its head and nose close to the surface of the stream, and remaining for an instant motion- less whilst taking aim, with its eyes fixed upon the insect, sud- denly it darts at it a drop of water from its snout with such strength and precision as rarely fail to bring down its object, often from a distance of five or six feet." To our own tench has often been ascribed the properties of healing other fish, and even the pike will never touch the" physician." The perca seanclens, or climbing perch, found in the East, will actually ascend trees in searoh of the crustaceans upon which it feeds. The salmon in our rivers will sometimes leap twelve or fourteen feet. The bleak, a little fish abounding in some streams, is often troubled with tape-worms of immense length,—the very worms, it has been stated, which figure in herbalists' shops as having been extracted from human subjects. These are piseatory curiosities that Only
an angler who gives up years to the pursuit can find out for him-- self; but every man can enjoy the pursuit in a less ambitious degree, and, thanks to the exertions of Mr. Francis and others, it will not be by any means difficult by and bye to find good sport in streams that have latterly been " whipped" bare of fish.
Previous page
