Book excerpt: The Dry Fly and Fast Water was written to fill a need created by the coming of the brown trout to America. The British flies and methods that followed it over here proved inapplicable. Therefore, it remained for fishing expert George La Branche to promulgate a new, distinctly American school of dry-fly angling. The proof of its validity is that today it is still widely practiced here. This remains one of the great classics of American fishing literature, covering everything from wonderfuldescriptions of fish behavior to details of the insects they feed on and the artificial flies that imitate those foods.