VOL. XX.] PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. 245 



the parts of generation, so much controverted, not only by the ancients but also 

 by modern authors, and thereby been in some measure capacitated to have satis- 

 fied myself concerning that no less controverted point, the manner of their gene- 

 ration. 



There are many who, with Aristotle, will have the generation of eels to be 

 spontaneous or equivocal, and will not allow them the distinction of sex, from 

 the difficulty how eels should come to be in any pool, pond, moat, or ditch, 

 in which never any were put. 



But that the generation of any animal cannot be equivocal or spontaneous, 

 but from animal parents, has been so well made out by many undeniable argu- 

 ments, and confirmed by multiplied experiments, by those celebrated naturalists 

 Malpighi, Redi, Swammerdam, Leuwenhoeck, Ray, and others, that I think 

 there is not the least doubt that eels have the same original. And if we 

 may credit what Dr. Plot, in his Natural History of Staffordshire, p. 243, writes 

 concerning the night travels of eels observed near Bilson in that county, by 

 Mr. Mosely, the way of their stocking ponds, &c. may not be so improbable 

 as at first it may be thought to be, if we but consider how long they will live 

 out of water ; and though I cannot with Pliny, in his Natural History, lib. Q, 

 cap. 21, allow the time to be 6 days, yet I am sure it may be long enough to 

 travel over a few short meadows, or from one ditch or pond to another, which 

 may be performed in much less time than one night; and if we may believe 

 what Gesner, in his Book of Fishes, lib. 4, cap. De Anguilla, quotes from Al- 

 bertus, of a parcel of eels, which in a very cold winter, anno 1125, not only 

 left their natural element, but were found in a dry meadow, bedded together 

 in a hay-stack, the thing will seem more probable ; to which let me add the 

 form of their bodies, which by their serpentine motion is adapted to travel in 

 arido. Neither are eels the only fish which are affirmed to live in sicco, but the 

 exocoetus, also mentioned by Rondeletius, with others so numerous, that Theo- 

 phrastus Eresius wrote a book of them, which was afterwards commented upon 

 by Aurelius Severinus, in a work entitled De Piscibus in sicco viventibus, 

 printed at Naples, anno l655. Not to mention the Carian and Paphlagonian 

 fishes, affirmed by Aristotle to wander up and down on the dry sands, and then 

 return back to sea again ; the like is also asserted of those of the river Cherati, 

 in Judea, by Geo. Pictorius. All which Rondeletius thinks, eels, as well as the 

 aforesaid fishes, perform by the rima of their gills, being narrow and thereby 

 capacitated to oppose the free, and too sudden appulses of the air. 



But the controversy does not terminate here, for even among those learned 

 persons who oppose an equivocal or spontaneous generation, the dispute is, 

 whether eels have distinct sex, or are hemaphrodites. By some a distinct sex 



