EIGHTH ANNUAL MEETING. AI 
250 horsefeet, or 15 bushels of soft clams ina night. The next 
day they will not be seen by any one. I have fed about six or 
seven thousand horsefeet this summer, at fifty cents per hun- 
dred. The pond is aclear sand bottom excepting about three 
acres in the middle, which is mud, from one to five feet deep ; 
the water is some five or six feet in the middle. Whole pond 
covers about five to seven acres. The margin is sandy all 
around. It is a spring-bottom pond. I put twenty-three small 
eels in the pond twelve years ago. In three or four years 
they weighed from two and a half to four pounds each, which 
was the cause of my trying this experiment. 
“J. N. WELLS.” 
So far I have considered this question of the procreative 
habits of eels on the theory that the eggs are deposited, whether 
impregnated previously or not, and that they hatch after extru- 
sion. I believe this to be the most natural and altogether the 
most probable theory; but I cannot ignore a considerable mass 
of testimony sustaining the idea that the young are born alive. 
It is barely possible that the eggs are developed in the body of 
the female in the fall, that they are fertilized by an act of co- 
ition with the male, that they are matured during the season of 
hibernation, that the young issue alive in the spring, the first 
moment their parents begin to move. There is nothing abso- 
lutely inadmissible in this theory when it is tested by the facts 
which we may regard as established, although for my own part 
Iam not ready to place faith in it. I cannot, however, totally 
ignore it, and I offer the following statements, taken from a con- 
siderable number which have been presented to me. There is 
an impression in the minds of some persons, who should be 
well informed, that the lamprey is the female of the common 
eel ; and one of the shrewdest observers of natural history, al- 
though not an educated man, gave me his personal evidence to 
that effect. He said that on one occasion he noticed a lamprey 
_ swimming upa small creek in the meadow, with a black fringe 
hanging to her neck. On close inspection this fringe turned 
out to be innumerable young eels clinging to her breathing- 
holes or gills, and his curiosity being aroused, he watched her 
