180 THE COMPLETE ANGLER 



either of dew, or out of the corruption of the earth, seems 

 to be made probable by the barnacles and young goslings 

 bred by the sun's heat and the rotten planks of an old 

 ship, and hatched of trees ; both which are related for 

 truths by Du Bartas and Lobel,* and also by our learned 

 Camden, and laborious Gerard.f in his Herbal. 



It is said by Rondeletius, that those eels that are bred 

 in rivers that relate to or be nearer to the sea, never 

 return to the fresh waters (as the salmon does always 

 desire to do), when they have once tasted the salt water ; 

 and I do the more easily believe this, because I am 

 certain that powdered beef is a most excellent bait to 

 catch an eel. And though Sir Francis Bacon will allow 

 the eel's life to be but ten years, yet he, in his History of 

 Life and Death, mentions a lamprey belonging to the 

 Roman emperor, to be made tame, and so kept for 

 almost threescore years ; and that such useful and 

 pleasant observations were made of this lamprey, that 

 Crassus the orator, who kept her, lamented her death. 

 And we read in Doctor Hakewill, that Hortensius 

 was seen to weep at the death of a lamprey that he had 

 kept long and loved exceedingly .J 



* Matthias de Lobel, or L'Obel, an eminent physician and botanist 

 of the sixteenth century, was a native of Lisle, in Flanders. He was 

 a disciple of Rondeletius, and, being invited to London by King 

 James the First, published there his Historia Plantarum, and died 

 in the year 1616. He was the author of several books connected 

 with medico-botany. 



t The person here mentioned is John Gerard, the first of our 

 English botanists : he was by profession a surgeon ; and published, 

 in 1597, a Herbal, in a large folio, dedicated to the lord treasurer 

 Burleigh ; and, two years after, a Catalogue of Plants, Herbs, etc., 

 to the number of eleven hundred, raised and naturalised by himself 

 in a large garden near his house in Holborn. The latter is dedicated 

 to Sir Walter Raleigh. 



J The author, vol. i. p. 212, has cited from Pliny an instance of 

 the fondness of Antonia, a woman, for a tame lamprey, which the 

 tenderness of her sex might perhaps excuse ; but the sagacity and 

 docility of these creatures seem less wonderful than the weakness of 

 such men as Crassus and Hortensius, in becoming mourners for the 

 death of an eel. The former of these two persons was, for this his 

 pusillanimity, reproached in the senate of Rome by Domitius, in 



