Excerpt from The Rod and the Gun: Being Two Treatises on Angling and Shooting Angling, or the art of fishing with rod and line, includes those branches of the piscatorial trade which are usually followed, not so much for profit, as for pleasant recreation. That the practice of casting angles into the brook had its origin in necessity, the mother of so many inventions, can hardly be doubted; but it is equally clear that the refined skill exhibited in this pursuit at the present day has been derived from leisure and the love of sport, aided by the more delicate gear which modern ingenuity has invented for the deception of the finny race. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.