TAKING HAPHAZARD A NUMBER of Fishing Gazette published in January [1894] last, I find therein advertisements of about 140 makers of fishing-tackle carrying on business in England, besides those of several well-known Scotch, Irish, and Welsh houses. How many other makers can be found advertising in the columns of the Field, Land and Water, the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, Rod and Gun, or in the local papers such as Yorkshire Post and the Northern Angler, I have not been at the pains to ascertain. I have selected the Fishing Gazette as the only London journal known to me which is exclusively devoted to angling and fish-culture.

'Hardy Bros. of Alnwick have always had a well-merited reputation.'

At Redditch, the centre of the wholesale fishing-tackle trade, literally tons of rods are turned out every year; but many of these are for export. I have, moreover, been unable to learn the proportion of fly-rods to trolling and other rods, and the ratio of increase in output during the late years. I am told, however, by a maker I can trust, that the yearly increase is enormous. But from Alnwick, better known to many an angler for its glued-up split-cane rods than for the old feudal fortress of the Percys, I have more specific information. Ten years ago the annual output of fly-rods from the Alnwick Works was, I am told, about 800. Of these 250 only were cane-built. At present it is as follows: Cane-built (with and without steel centres), about 3,500; greenheart, whole cane, and other materials, 1,600. These figures are the more convincing when one calls to mind the fact that cane-built rods, in which the increase is most marked, are of necessity very expensive; each joint being made of six strips split from the hard elastic rind of the Indian male bamboo, so adjusted that, when glued and bound together, they form one solid structure. They are made, and well made, elsewhere in Great Britain (to say nothing of America), but Hardy Bros. of Alnwick have always had a well-merited reputation for their manufacture. Some people think them not quite so durable as solid-wood rods, but with care they will last for many years; and, although I fear I can hardly claim for anglers that they are wholly free from the weakness of buying for novelty’s sake what they do not strictly need, the number of rods sold in one year probably bears a very small proportion to the number of anglers using such rods.