433 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



In some regions this is an event of the spring much looked forward to. 

 The little eels are known as elvers — a corruption of eel-fare — and are 

 boiled and pressed into cakes — eel-cakes — which become for the time 

 being an important article of food. 



Both elvers and adults, however, are found above obstructions in 

 the rivers which seem to make impassable barriers. It is certain that 

 the young display the greatest persistence in climbing streams, and 

 evidence is not wanting that to get around obstacles they leave their 

 native element and make a land journey. The stories on this point 

 do violence even to the somewhat lax canons which by tradition and 

 present practice are supposed to govern the history of the tribe of fishes. 

 There is no doubt that they can wriggle for some distance over favor- 

 able ground, as through wet grass. Albertus Magnus writes in 1545: 

 ' The eel also comes out of the water in the night time into the fields 

 where he can find pease, beans, and lentils. ' Another writer contradicts 

 pointedly in differing from this opinion. He says : ' They eat fish, 

 do not come on the land and do not eat pease, but remain in the water 

 always and are nocturnal animals.' But Bach, a Prussian naturalist, 

 insists that eels do devastate the pea patches and avows that the 

 peasants fish for them with the plow by cutting a furrow before day- 

 break, which intercepts their retreat, and that sometimes for the 

 same purpose sand or ashes are used, which adheres or dries the slime 

 on their bodies, making locomotion impossible. On the other hand, 

 it is related that eels stranded by the drying of pools adjacent to larger 

 waters have not attempted the short journey necessary to return to the 

 main stream, and that the presence of eels far overland is to be attrib- 

 uted to poachers who throw them away in flight from pursuit. 



It is not to be doubted that the necessity of water breathing is no 

 bar to short overland journeys. The moisture of the grass or ground 

 which is a necessary condition of such wanderings probably replaces 

 somewhat for breathing purposes the natural . medium which the eel 

 leaves and to which his return can not be long delayed. Many fish can 

 suspend respiration for quite a while without suffering injury. Con- 

 cerning this habit a curious opinion is expressed by an English writer 

 not so many years ago. He says, speaking of the eel, ' The curious air- 

 bladders, so-called — which are really intended as reservoirs for water 

 to moisten the gills of the fish when traveling out of the water — have 

 been held to prove that it is properly an air-breathing creature, which 

 occasionally, like some snakes, sojourns in the water for reasons of 

 its own.' 



The eel seems to have taken its name, and in more languages 

 than one, from its suggestion of the snake. The Anglo-Saxon aal is 

 derived from the Finnish for slimy, while the scientific name is the 



