180 FLY FISHING FOE TKOUT. 



naturalist; Taverner, if he had not been so 

 strangely neglected, might have filled the same 

 office for an earlier age. John Taverner was 

 Surveyor of the Royal Woods on the South of 

 the River Trent for King James I. He pub- 

 lished in 1600 a book, original and rare, called 

 Certaine experiments concerning fish and 

 fruite. It is full of observation far in advance 

 of his time : if Walton had read it, that great 

 man would have avoided certain fantastic 

 theories concerning the generation of pike and 

 eels. Perhaps the most remarkable thing in 

 the book is an accurate description of the 

 migration of the eel, which has puzzled 

 naturalists to this day. Indeed it is only in 

 this year 1920 that the actual breeding place 

 has been discovered, far off in the West 

 Atlantic, south of the Bermudas. Hither, in 

 the depths of the sea, eels from all Europe 

 repair to breed, and when they have bred they 

 die : and hence every spring come the elvers, 

 crossing an ocean they have never traversed 

 and bound for lands they have never seen ; 

 until, guided by some force of which we know 

 nothing, they repeople the rivers, the streams, 

 even the very ponds from which their parents 

 departed. Few stories in natural history are 

 so entrancing, few contrasts are so poignant, 

 as that of the eel; which in its infancy crosses 

 three thousand miles of ocean and forces its 

 way up rivers and streams and ditches in order 

 that it may spend its life in the agreeable mud 



