A Latin book _Dialogus creaturarum optime moralizatus_ was published in 1480; a translation about 1520 styles it _The Dialogues of Creatures Moralysed_. This very rare work, which I have found fully dealt with from an Angler’s point of view only by Dr. Turrell, furnishes the earliest known illustration of an angler fishing with a float. Next in date, and last to be noticed here, comes the famous _Treatyse of Fysshynge with an Angle_, printed at Westminster by Wynkyn de Worde in 1496 as part of the second edition of _The Boke of St. Albans_. Whether, as has been commonly supposed, Dame Juliana Berners wrote it, or whether any such lady ever existed, are points of controversy, but that _The Treatyse_ was not an immaculate conception, without parents or ancestors, can be reasonably proved by its reference to earlier writers on fishing, and to its “these ben the xii flies ye shall use” being introduced as a precept of practice rather than a revelation of invention. If few the forbears of what some term “not only the first angling manual in England, but also the first practical work written in any language,” its vitality and its prolific progeny admit of no doubt. According to Mr. A. Lang (who accounts for the startling fact by the increased number of people able to read owing to the spread of education) no less than ten editions of _The Boke_ were issued within four years of publication, while Dr. Turrell limits himself to fourteen undated editions between 1500 and 1596. Whatever the number of the editions, the need for and the vitality of _The Treatyse_ is demonstrated by the fact that for over a hundred years no new work on Angling was printed in England, and between it and _The Compleat Angler_—a space of over one hundred and fifty years—there occur but four books on the subject.[110] To its prolific progeny, the _Bibliotheca Piscatoria_ bears witness[111] in its catalogue of some fifteen hundred authors and of countless books, MSS. etc. We owe, it is said, this voluminous literature to the geographical position of England, which lends itself very favourably to the pursuit of all kinds of fishing. Can we, also, flatteringly add the other factor of Lacépède’s dictum, “Il y a cette différence entre la chasse et la pêche, que cette dernière convient aux peuples les plus civilisés?” But the pursuit of fishing did not prevail in early England or Scotland. A passage in Bede (probably used by Henry of Huntingdon), which has, I think, escaped the many-eyed net of our fishing authors, testifies to its absence in the former.