174 THE COMPLETE ANGLER. 



differ about their breeding : some say they breed by generation, 

 as other fish do ; and otliers, that they breed as some Avorms 

 do, of mud ; as rats and mice and many other living creatures 



Their folded len<^ths they round each other twine, 

 Twist amorous knots, and shiny bodies join ; 

 Till the close strife brings off a frothy juice, 

 The seed that must their wriggling kind produce." 



Book 1 , 849 — 54 Jones's. 



Athenaeus is of the same opinion. The notion that they are bred from 

 dew (as Helmont thought), is probably taken from young eels being seen 

 among the grass, as before stated. Homer is thought to have distinguished 

 between eels and fish (Iliad xxiii., 204), tyxtKvis rt Kai indies, but I 

 question whether it is more than a habit of speecli common among our- 

 selves. The lamprey of the ancients {Petromyzon Marimis), though 

 an eel-shaped fish, is not properly an eel, but belongs to the CJwndropte- 

 rys;n. The muraena, a beautifully marked species, was, as has been stated 

 in our Bib. Pref., very highly esteemed among the ancients^and called by 

 them the Helen of their feasts, from which its scientific name has been 

 taken. Eels figure largely in the classic writers, and the best were taken 

 in the Strymon, near Aristotle's birth-place, and in the Copais, a Boeotian 

 lake. Some of the most severe hits at his countrymen, by Aristophanes, 

 are taken from their fondness for eels. It may also amuse the reader to 

 know that several proverbs drawn from eels are at least as old as that 

 comic dramatist ; thus, Athenaeus preserves a comparison from one of his 

 lost comedies, " as slippery as an eel ;" and Simonides, in one of his Iam- 

 bics, has the same. " To fish in troubled waters," is also found in Aristo- 

 phanes, The Knights, GGl, when he compares persons that trouble the 

 state for the sake of personal advancement, to eel fishers, who stir up the 

 mud. Archilochus also, according to Athenaeus, speaks of " catching 

 blind eels ;" and, strange to say, there is a tiny species of lamprey (the 

 Lancelet of Yarrell) which, like the catfish ol' the Kentucky Cave, has no 

 eyes. 



Aldrovandus describes a mode of catching cols us practised in Holland, 

 which corresponds exactly to what we call bobbing— that is, by letting 

 down from a boat at night into the water a rmmber of large worms 

 threaded together in a knot {glotnerative colligatas), which tempt the 

 eels to bite so strongly that they are drawn up in great numbers; but the 

 strangest mode of fishing for the eel, is that related by Oppian, Halieutics 

 (iv., 450 — GI), as used by boys : the youth takes a long fiesh sheep's gut, 

 and lets down one end of it into the water; the eel greedily sucks in 

 the pleasing bait, when the fisher blows up the gut, which, dilating the 

 eel's mouth and throat, he is easily drawn up. ^lian, JSTat. Animal. 

 (xiv., 8), details the process, a!id says that it is common among the eel fishers 

 of the Po. The eel pot or basket is well known ; but perhaps nowhere 



