EELS AND THE EEL QUESTION. 433 



Latin for snake, Anguilla. Many English names of places are com- 

 pounded of eel — witness Elmore, Ellesmere, and Ely. Of the latter 

 Fuller, in ' Worthies of Cambridgeshire, ' has this illuminating explana- 

 tion: ''When the priests of this part of the country would still retain 

 their wives in spite of whatever the pope and monks could do to the 

 contrary, their wives and children were miraculously turned into eels, 

 whence it had the name Ely. I consider this a lie." Like other ob- 

 jects of popular interest which include elements of mystery, eels are 

 the subject of the most extravagant tales. Some of these are quite 

 analogous to the threadbare story of the live frog found in the interior 

 of a solid rock. A New England paper some years ago heralded that 

 'a live and active eel, a few days since, was dug out from a depth of 

 five feet in the soil of Exeter, New Hampshire.' Doubtless this eel 

 is exhumed annually. The tenacity of life of frogs and eels affords the 

 starting point for these legends. Likewise to the voracity of eels may 

 we credit an ancient chronicle that in England a few of them were one 

 dark night observed to consume entirely a stack of hay. It may be in 

 a spirit of emulation that some German carp — importation of the Gov- 

 ernment — artificially transplanted to the pond of a western farmer, 

 came out one night and ate up the crop of buckwheat on a neighboring 

 field. Elvers are reported to climb trees and the tale might not be 

 incredible, provided any imaginable reason for such conduct could be 

 assigned, for by their persistence they sometimes ascend the perpen- 

 dicular barrier of a dam a short distance. This they accomplish by 

 the partial drying of those that first essay the ascent, which therefore 

 stick to the boards and afford a slight foothold for the next comers, 

 which wriggle a little higher and then in turn stick fast and perish. 



These stories might be multiplied ad nauseam, but more interesting 

 are a few facts about the symbolic significance of the eel. His slipperi- 

 ness long ago passed into a proverb. Among the pictorial writings of 

 the Egyptians the representation of an eel held by the tail denoted 'a 

 man vainly pursuing a fugitive object. ' A Greek expression of similar 

 import reads, 'You've an eel by the tail.' It is not so well known that 

 an eel figures also in an emblem of quite opposite meaning — certainty 

 instead of uncertainty. It is quite impossible to hold one in any 

 ordinary clutch of the hand. The intervention of a fig leaf, however, 

 makes the grasp secure, and the Egyptians depicted an eel rolled up in 

 a fig leaf when they wished to express certainty regarding things that 

 were a -priori uncertain. 



VOL. lxi. — 28. 



