338 THE PRACTICAL FISHERMAN. 



and to gather up hatched fry for microscopical examination from waters 

 far above the level of the adjoining land, where egress meant impossi- 

 bility of return. 



But it is very amusing to notice the quaint and absurd opinions of 

 some of the olden writers on this subject. " Oppian," says learned Dr. 

 Badham, "supposes an embrace of the sexes actually to take place, after 

 which a strigimentum or gluey exudation from the surface of the body 

 detaches itself and falls to the bottom, where it is vitalised, not by the 

 co-operation of any apocryphal mud nymph some 



Young Lutetia, softer than the down, 

 Nigrina black, or Merdamente brown, 



but by an intra-uterine action of the mud itself; for what," asks 

 Oppian, "is so engendering as mud?" Aristotle confesses to a similar 

 opinion, and calls eels "the solitary race that have neither seed nor 

 offspring." Pliny thought that they rubbed themselves against the 

 rocks after they were tired of living, and from the detritus issued a new 

 breed. Others thought, like Virgil's bees, that eels came from the 

 carcases of animals ; others that the soaking of a stallion's tail would 

 infallibly breed eels. ("Might not," asks Dr. Badham, "such a 

 popular superstition of hair passing into snakes have originated the 

 singular tresses of Medusa ? ") 



Finally, according to the same authority, some ancient naturalists, find- 

 ing the terrestrial origin of eels obscure, had recourse to the skies, and 

 attributed this multitudinous race to Jupiter and a white-armed goddess 

 named Anguilla. Accordingly, Archestratus in his description of an Attic 

 feast, introduces Anguilla boasting of her Jove-sprung offspring. Van 

 Helmont in much later times believed that they came from May-dew, and 

 might be obtained by the following process : " Cut up two turfs covered 

 with May-dew, and lay one upon the other, the grassy sides inwards, and 

 thus expose them to the heat of the sun ; in a few hours there will spring 

 from them an infinite quantity of eels." 



Other writers have searched and discovered the young eels in strange 

 parts of the parent. Leuewenhock found them in the urinary, and Vallis- 

 nieri in the swim bladder, whilst others have extracted them from the 

 intestinal canal. Old an angler and observant as Heath, of Wraysbury, 

 is, he once assured me that he had exuded young eels from the excre- 

 mental vent. 



All this is absurd enough. But what shaU be said of Eondelet who 

 professes to have seen eels embrace each other as serpents do. (By- 

 the-bye, 4;he same eyes saw a lamprey stop a cardinal's ship in full 

 sail.) A host of other curious and funny opinions and assertions could 



