[5] THE EEL QUESTION. 467 



Bologna, which handed it over to Prof. Oajetan Mont,. As he was sick 

 and could not in person superintend the investigation, he called a num- 

 ber of his scientific friends together for a consultation on the subject. 

 There were present at his house, among others, the anatomists Carlo 

 Mondini and Germano Azzoguidio, the famous discoverer of galvanism, 

 then an unknown student, Camillo Galvani, whose eminent scientific 

 talents are specially mentioned in the report.* The eel was examined 

 by all the persons present at this conference, and recognized as closely 

 resembling the one described seventy years previous by Vallisneri. It 

 was finally unanimously resolved to request the famous anatomist Mon- 

 dini to make a thorough examination of this precious fish. He entered 

 upon his work with great zeal, and the paper which was its result was 

 read at the academy in May, 1777. This treatise is entitled "De 

 anguillee ovariis," but was not published till six years later in the 

 "Commentarii," &c, of the academy, t Mondini, first of all, showed in 

 the most convincing manner that the supposed ovarium described by 

 Vallisneri had been nothing but the swimming-bladder of the eel dis- 

 tended unnaturally by sickness, and that the small round grains which 

 had been mistaken for eggs were only swelled glands. Mondini at the 

 same time published an accurate description, accompanied by excellent 

 illustrations, of the true ovaria of the eel discovered by him. This 

 work, which contains a very fine illustration of the magnified eggs, may, 

 both as to form and contents, be termed a standard work ; and it is an 

 act of historic justice to say that it was not O. F. Midler or Eathke, but 

 Carlo Mondini, who first discovered and described the female organs of 

 the eelj which for centuries had been sought after in vain.| Three years 

 later, and as it seems independently of Mondini, the eminent zoologist, 

 Otto Friedrich Midler, published his discovery of the ovaria of the eel 

 in the publications of the Berlin Society of Naturalists.§ A peculiar 



* Monti (p. 393) calls him "prreclara indole adolescens, ad naturalem historiani 

 excoleudam natus" (a young man of remarkable talents, born for the study of natural 

 sciences). 



t De Bononiensi Scientiarum et Artiurn Instituto atque Academia Commentarii. 

 Tomus VI. Bononia?, 1783, p. 40G. et seq. 



$ Prof. G. B. Ercolani, of Bologna, and Professors Crivelli and Maggi, in articles 

 published by them in 1872, very justly complain that the priority of Mondini's dis- 

 covery had been overlooked in Germany. Neither Eathke, nor Hohnbaum-Hornschuch, 

 nor Schliiser have mentioned his work. S. Nilsson, in his " Skandinavisk Fauna,'' 

 1855, knows nothing of Mondini. In his " Histoire naturelle des Poissons" be men- 

 tions O. F. Miiller and Cuvier as the first who had described the ovaria, and Eathke 

 as the first discoverer of tho eggs. As far as I know, Th. von Siebold was the first 

 who, in 1863, in his work, "Die Susswasserfische von Mitteleuropa" (p. 349), men- 

 tioned that Mondini had discovered the ovaria of tbe eel almost simultaneously with 

 O. F. Miiller, and that the two discoveries had been entirely independent of each 

 other. Tbe erroneous opinion that the Italian discovery had been made after the 

 German is easily explained by the fact that Miiller's treatise was published in 1780, 

 and Mondini's, though written and read in 1777, not till 1783. 



§ "Schriften der Berlinischen Gesellschaft naturforschender Freunde," vol. i, 1730, 

 p. 204, article entitled "Bemiihungen bei den Intestiualwurinern " 



