[3] THE EEL QUESTION. 465 



other. This opinion was held by Pliny, by xithenoeus, and Oppian, and 

 was again taken up in the sixteenth century by Eondelet, and later by 

 Conrad Gessner. 



The second group comprises the opinions held by people who acci- 

 dentally found worm-like organisms in the entrails of the eel, who 

 described these, and therefore considered the eel as an animal producing 

 live young ones. Although even Aristotle rejected this opinion as 

 erroneous, and rightly supposed that these worms were nothing but 

 intestinal worms, there have been discoverers of live young eels up to 

 the present time. I find this opinion in the Middle Ages in the 

 " Thierbuch " — book of animals — by Albertus Magnus, and later in the 

 works of naturalists like Leuwenhcek, Eisner, Eedi, and Fahlberg. 

 Linne" likewise inclined towards this opinion, and maintained that the 

 eel produced live young ones. A few years ago a professor at the gym- 

 nasium (college) of Eostock published an article in the " Gartenlaube,"* 

 in which he gave a rapturous description of the young eels discovered 

 by him in a female eel, and the same opinion was again advanced by others 

 during the summer of 1877. It is quite natural that persons who are 

 not versed in natural history, and who, on opening an eel, find in its 

 inside a more or less considerable number of live worm-like beings, are 

 at once inclined to consider them as the young of the eel. It must be 

 stated, however, that whenever such so-called young eels were subjected 

 to a scientific examination, they turned out to be intestinal worms.t 



The last group comprises the opinion that eels are born, not from eels 

 but from other fish, and even from other animals. Absurd as this opin- 

 ion is — which in a certain sense must also be traced back to Aristotle — 

 it is very common, even at the present day, among all eel fishermen, 

 especially those living on the coast near the mouths of rivers. A slimy 

 fish — the Zoarces viviparus L. — owes the name by which it is commonly 

 known — the ll Eel-mother " — to this opinion. In Comacchio I have 

 again met with instances of the inexterminable belief of the fishermen 

 that the eel is born from other fish. They even go so far as to point 

 out certain differences in the color and shape of the Mugil cephalus as 

 the causes of the different color and shape of eels. It is a very old 

 opinion, prevalent to this day, that eels copulate with water snakes, but 

 it seems incredible, and is nevertheless a positive fact, that the Sardin- 

 ian fishermen consider a beetle, the Dytiscus Roeselii, as the procreator 

 of the eel. They very generally call this beetle " Eel-mother." 



No scientific investigation of the question of the procreation of the 

 eel could be made until, towards the end of the Middle Ages, the influ- 

 ence which Aristotle had hitherto exercised over the opinions of all 

 learned men began to wane. At the revival of natural sciences iu 

 the sixteenth century naturalists took up this special question with 



♦Volume for 1874, p. 120. 



t Most of the worms inhabiting the intestines of the eel belong to the species Ascaris 

 labiata. 



S. Miss. 59 30 



