280 THE COMPLETE ANGLER. 



a kind of eel-cake of them, and eat it like as bread. And 

 Gesner quotes Venerable Bede a to say, that in England 

 there is an island called Ely, by reason of the innumerable 

 number of eels that breed in it. But that eels may be bred 

 as some worms and some kind of bees and wasps are, 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, b and also by our learned Camden, and 

 laborious Gerard, 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, lamentec 

 her death. And we read in Doctor Hakewill, that Hortensiu 

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

 kept long and loved exceedingly. 



It is granted by all, or most men, that eels, for about six 

 months, that is to say, the six cold months of the year, sti 

 not up and down, neither in the rivers, nor in the pools in 

 which they usually are, but get into the soft earth or mud 

 and there many of them together bed themselves, and live 



