THE EEL 159 



life-history of the Eel, describes and figures a ripe 

 male Eel, 14 inches long, taken at the beginning 

 of September 1903, in Praesto Fjord. This example 

 is remarkable for the large size of the eye, the 

 diameter of which is greater than the length of the 

 snout. A ripe female Eel in the British Museum 

 was taken at Mullingar, Westmeath, in the middle 

 of Ireland, in October 1906; it is 27 inches long; 

 the eye is not large for a Silver Eel, its diameter 

 measuring only a little more than one-half the length 

 of the snout and considerably less than the inter- 

 ocular width, but the sexual organs are enormously 

 developed and greatly distend the abdomen. Two 

 very similar but smaller examples, captured at 

 Toom Bridge, where the Bann leaves Lough Neagh, 

 were described by J. T. Cunningham in 1896. 



It seems pretty certain that all the Eels which 

 go down to the sea from the British Isles spawn 

 in the winter or spring in the Atlantic to the west 

 and south-west of Ireland, at depths of 500 fathoms 

 or more, and then die ; at any rate, none of them 

 ever come back. The eggs and earliest young have 

 not yet been certainly identified, but it is probable 

 that the former are large and float at or near the 

 surface, where the latter also hatch out, feed, and 

 grow. 



A group of small transparent fishes, the Lepto- 

 cephalids, were for a long time a puzzle to 

 naturalists; in 1864 an American, Dr. Th. Gill, 

 expressed the view that one of them, known to 

 zoologists as Leptocephalus morrissii, was a young 

 Conger, a conclusion which was arrived at independ- 

 ently a few years later by a Frenchman, Dareste, and 

 in 1886 was proved to be true by another Frenchman, 



