428 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



This idea, entirely erroneous, was corroborated later by a correct 

 observation. This time it was in another direction that the investigator 

 came to grief — so slippery was the eel question. He was not examining 

 an eel, but an eel-pout, a fish very far removed from the eel, but so re- 

 sembling it externally that the ichthyologists have, for a specific name, 

 called it anguillaris, eel-like. And it has been popularly known as 

 'mother-of-eels. ' This eel-like fish is really viviparous, it produces its 

 young alive, and they resemble small eels. The learned doctor thought 

 he had solved the eel question. But he hadn't. To add to the con- 

 fusion, another authority reviewed this work on the eel-pout and decided, 

 being influenced by the previous real mistakes of the same nature, that 

 tbe supposed young eels were only worms. This was plausible, yet he 

 was wrong, for they were undoubtedly legitimate little eel-pouts, mis- 

 taken for little eels. Every one, it appears, who took up the question, 

 managed from a basis of truth to reach a wrong conclusion. 



Aristotle held that eels were also produced from the ' bowels of the 

 earth,' by which he meant nothing more than common earthworms, 

 which he curiously conceived to be thus related to Mother Earth. 

 Other opinion maintained that eels were the offspring not of eels, but 

 of other kinds of fishes, or of animals that were not even fishes. This 

 heterodoxy was too much for Aristotle, but to this day is prevalent in 

 some form among eel fishermen in various parts of the world. As for 

 instance, that the ' aal-mutter' referred to, the eel-pout, really pro- 

 duces eels; that eels pair with water snakes; and in Sardinia that the 

 well-known Dytiscus beetle is responsible for eels. 



If these conflicting theories seem to us a ludicrous and amusing 

 hodge-podge, it must not be forgotten that they were the wisdom of 

 bygone days. Out of them the eel question resolved itself into a 

 serious problem which interested the whole biological world, and to 

 which the first talent in science addressed itself and on which volumi- 

 nous and pretentious treatises appeared. Buff on, the naturalist, re- 

 marked that he considered the question of the generation of eels one 

 of the most puzzling in natural history. Very appropriately it re- 

 mained for the century of Isaac Walton to first assert that eels were 

 not the subjects of a special dispensation for their replenishment, and 

 that the mystery of their generation was the same mystery that envel- 

 ops the rest of the kingdom of life. This not very brilliant announce- 

 ment seems to have been put forth as a purely academic deduction. 

 There were no observations in the modern sense, and the author of the 

 ' Compleat Angler ' was not particularly enthusiastic over it. He 

 merely mentions it without subscribing, and says : ' But most men 

 differ about their breeding,' and then after citing at some length what 

 ' some say ' and ' others say, ' remarks : ' But that eels may be bred as 



