26l 



free to confess is more liable to mislead is the evidence 

 often presented to us of fish swimming about in apparent 

 activity whose bodies, nevertheless, contain many scores, or 

 even in the case of minute entozoa, many hundreds of 

 thousands of parasites. To my mind, however, this only 

 proves the truth of a conclusion long ago forced upon me 

 by evidence. This may be cast in the form of a definite 

 proposition, as follows : " Fish can sustain a relatively 

 greater amount of parasitism than any other animal belong- 

 ing to the class of vertebrates." That is a proposition 

 which will, I think, long hold its ground, but in the face of 

 the facts already adduced it is impossible to deny that, 

 even in fish, parasites may be sufficiently numerous to 

 bring about a veritable plague or piscine epizooty. 



I quite agree with Professor Huxley that an undue 

 " fuss " has been made about the nematodes so common in 

 mackerel, cod, herrings, haddocks, whiting and so forth. 

 For many years past I have been favoured with letters 

 on this subject, and I believe that in Denmark such 

 affected fish are rejected at the markets. On the other 

 hand I was told the other evening, by Prince Louis 

 Lucien Bonaparte, that in the Basque provinces filaricz 

 are actually collected and eaten under the notion that 

 these parasites are young eels, which have found their way 

 into the bodies of fish that have thus become as it were 

 their foster-parents ! It is curious to notice the strange 

 delusions under which continental peasantry everywhere 

 labour. I have remarked the same error of interpretation 

 in England regarding the supposed eel-nature of the 

 lumbricoid parasites of man and quadrupeds ; but for 

 one of the most instructive delusions of this order we must 

 repair to the South of France, where to this day, I believe, 

 the large entozoa that occasionally sweep off the wolves of 



