Mr Stoddart must feel neither anger nor surprise if we deliberately
avoid not merely any discussion, but even any notice whatever, of
theories or speculations, directly or collaterally referring to the
breeding or propagation of fishes. We have not been, as the pages of
Maga prove, unwatchful of what conjectural philosophy might propose,
or ingenious experimentalism might exhibit. We hold some piscine
opinions, so curious but so true, that if we could enunciate them in a
language intelligible to fish (which ought to be the Finnish dialect,)
the liveliest salmon in Norway could not execute summersets
sufficiently numerous to express his astonishment at our knowledge. We
could likewise put such puzzling objections to the most elaborate and
seemingly satisfactory systems, as to demonstrate irrefragably that,
in spite of every thing which every body has said about every variety
of the _salmo_ race, nobody knows any thing certain as to the age Of
OLD PARR. But, for one good reason, we shall be discreet and silent.
Nobody cares a straw, or a horse-hair, or a thread of gut, whether
Stoddart is overthrown, or Shaw is predominant,--nobody, whose sole
and laudable object is to enjoy a day's good fishing. The great fact
remains--the waters are full of fish. What matter is it whence the
fins came or come? The question is not how they got into, but how they
are to be taken out of the burn, the river, or the lake? It is not we
who mean to go
"Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave;"
but up out of it we hope to draw many dozens of its peopling swarms.
And we desire to learn from Mr Stoddart how best we may, by baits and
guileful spells, reach and inveigle, them--
"In their obscured haunts of inmost bowers."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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