Abstract
IT is long since we have read any book, written by an angler for anglers, with so much pleasure as Mr. Skues's “Minor Tactics of the Chalk Stream.” The polemics of ardent advocates of the dry fly or the wet fly may instruct, and possibly convert, but they weary the reader; the object of the present book is to advance no theory, but to make the angler approach his subject (and his trout) with an open mind, and think out for himself the problems with which he is confronted. Herein, we conceive, lies the true value of the book. The scene is laid upon the banks of a chalk stream, or of some carrier in the water-meadows that holds dark, hog-backed trout; for setting we have the willows and lush herbage of a southern valley, wfTile the reed warbler, the dabchick, and the corn-crake, are cast for minor parts; yet there counsel which we would commend to those whose waters run through heather and bog-myrtle, where the trout are small, with fair golden bellies and ring-spotted sides, and the angler's music is the sweet spring cry of the curlew or the drumming of the snipe.
Minor Tactics of the Chalk Stream, and Kindred Studies.
By G. E. M. Skues. Pp. xii+133. (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1910.) Price 3s. 6d. net.
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B., L. Minor Tactics of the Chalk Stream, and Kindred Studies . Nature 83, 394 (1910). https://doi.org/10.1038/083394a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/083394a0