Professor James Rennie, 1833

he 'Alphabet of Scientific Angling for the Use of Beginners' to give it its full title, is a little known, but nonetheless important work. Rennie set out to make his book:

...as much a brief natural history of fish as a treatise on angling; and that I have, as far as practicable, founded what I have said and borrowed from others, respecting the art, upon the basis of science, a circumstance in which all the books on angling that I have met with are lamentably deficient.

Never a truer word was spoken, given that the majority of anglers still believed that insects fell on the water from above, parr were thought by many to be a separate species of fish to salmon and there was no agreed nomenclature for mayflies among anglers.

Rennie writes about the sense of taste, hearing and smell in fishes and he was one of the first to point out that fish are very near sighted and that it is a total fallacy to write of 'sharp-eyed trout'. He also wrote about nymphs and the first detailed illustrations that I am aware of appear in the Alphabet.

he 'Alphabet of Scientific Angling for the Use of Beginners' to give it its full title, is a little known, but nonetheless important work. Rennie set out to make his book:

...as much a brief natural history of fish as a treatise on angling; and that I have, as far as practicable, founded what I have said and borrowed from others, respecting the art, upon the basis of science, a circumstance in which all the books on angling that I have met with are lamentably deficient.

Never a truer word was spoken, given that the majority of anglers still believed that insects fell on the water from above, parr were thought by many to be a separate species of fish to salmon and there was no agreed nomenclature for mayflies among anglers.

Rennie writes about the sense of taste, hearing and smell in fishes and he was one of the first to point out that fish are very near sighted and that it is a total fallacy to write of 'sharp-eyed trout'. He also wrote about nymphs and the first detailed illustrations that I am aware of appear in the Alphabet.