162 THE COMPLETE ANGLER. 



truths by Du Bartas and Lobel, and also by our learned Cam- 

 den, 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 water, (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 ftlmost 

 threescore years ; and that such useful and pleasant observations 

 were made of this Lamprey, that Crassus the orator, who kept 

 her, lamented her death. And we read in Dr Hake will, that 

 Hortensius was seen to weep at the death of a Lamprey that he 

 had kept long, and loved exceedingly, f 



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 stir 

 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 without feeding 

 upon any thing, as I have told you some swallows have been 

 observed to do in hollow trees, for those cold six months. J 



* All this, though according to the belief of that age, is utterly impossible 

 and absurd. The controversy, however, about the breeding of the Eel 

 seems scarcely vet settled, Sir E. Home maintaining- that they arc herma- 

 phrodite, like the earth-worm; and M. Bony, that they are like serpents, 

 male and female. J. R. 



f The author has previously cited from Pliny an instance of the 

 fondness of Antonia, a woman, for a tame Lamprey, which the tenderness 

 of her sex might perhaps excuse; but the sagacity and docility of these 

 creatures seem less wonderful than the weakness of such men as Craeeus 

 and Hortensius, in becoming mourners for the death of an Eel. 



The former of these two persons was, for this his pusillanimity, reproached 

 in the senate of Home by Domitius, in these words: " Foolish Crassus ! 

 you wept for your Mure'na," [or Lamprey.] " That is more," retorted 

 Crassus, " than you did for your two wives." Lord Bacon's Apophthegms. 



t It is now well ascertained that swallows do not, and cannot, live under 

 water amongst mud ; and though Eels could so live, they prefer wintering 

 in the sea. This is so well known in famous Eel rivers, such as the Ban, 

 which flows out of Loch Neagh into the sea, near Coleraine, that there is 

 a highly lucrative fishery established to take the Eels in their autumnal 

 run to the sea. There they breed, and the young Eels come up the river 

 from the sea early in summer. 



I once myself witnessed this return of the young Eel?, on the 13th of 

 May. The river Clyde was embrowned at the time in consequence of 

 a recent fall of rain, which may have partly induced them to contina 

 running after sunrise. Their line of march, if I may call it so, was abotit 

 afoot or more from the edge of the bank, with which they kept nearly 

 parallel, and their column might be about six inches broad. Jl'he Eels 

 themselves were all of one size, about as thick as a crow quill, and about 

 three inches long. They kept so closely together, that there might be, I 

 should suppose, some hundreds in a foot's length of the column. What 

 was no less singular, the column itself appeared, in ite whole extent, to be 



