2 6o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



The London market is chiefly supplied from Holland, the eels being 

 brought over alive in welled vessels. Queen Elizabeth gave a free 

 mooring to these Dutch skoots, and this privilege has been taken ad- 

 vantage of up to the present time. The Dutch eels, however, are 

 very much inferior in flavor to the English, and it seems, therefore, 

 somewhat of a pity that they should have almost a monopoly of the 

 London market. The Norfolk eels, that are caught in such huge quan- 

 tities, are nearly all sent to Birmingham and the Black Country. In 

 Scotland eels are looked upon with abhorrence, consequently eel-fisher- 

 ies may be said not to exist there. In Ireland, however, the eel-fisher- 

 ies are enormously valuable ; the eel-weirs on the Erne are said to 

 bring in five or six thousand pounds sterling a year. At Ballisodare 

 the eel-fisheries were found to greatly increase in value by hanging 

 loosely plaited ropes of straw or hay over any obstructions which 

 would be likely to bar the course of the elvers up-stream. These 

 ropes act as ladders, up which the elvers climb, and the immense 

 annual destruction we have already spoken of is averted. Eels cost 

 but little to cultivate, never fail to find a good market, and are one of 

 the richest and most nutritious forms of food possible to find ; surely, 

 therefore, in all questions of cheap food-supply they should receive 

 the highest attention. The late Mr. Frank Buckland showed his usual 

 good sense when he declared that the English eel-fisheries were not 

 half developed, and that they deserved considerably more attention 

 than they had hitherto got. That they should soon get this attention 

 must be the hope of all those who do not like to see the good gifts 

 of Nature contemptuously thrown aside and disregarded. Saturday 

 Hevieio. 



> 



SKETCH OF GEOEGE ENGELMANN, M. D. 



THE United States has had many botanists who, making the best 

 use of the immense resources of fresh material which our large 

 and virgin country afforded, have made extensive and important addi- 

 tions to the scope of their science. None among them, perhaps un- 

 less we make a single exception has done better work in this line and 

 made more valuable contributions than Dr. George Engelmann. " More 

 than fifty years ago," says Dr. Asa Gray, in his sketch of him, " his 

 oldest associates in this countrv one of them his survivor dedicated 

 to him a monotypical genus of plants, a native of the plains over 

 whose borders the young immigrant on his arrival wandered solitary 

 and disheartened. Since then the name of Engelmann has, by his 

 own resources and authorship, become unalterably associated with the 

 buffalo-grass of the plains, the noblest conifers in the Rocky Mount- 

 ains, the most stately cactus in the world, and with most of the asso- 



