92 FISH CULTURAL ASSOCIATION. 
act of historic justice to state that neither O. F. Miiller nor Rath- 
ke, but really Carlo Mondini was the first discoverer, describer, 
and demonstrator of the female organs of the eel, which had 
been sought for so many centuries.™, 
Three years later, entirely independent of Mondini, the cele- 
brated zodlogist, Otto Friedrich Miiller, published his discovery 
of the ovary of the eel in the “ Proceedings of the Society of 
Naturalists,” at Berlin. 
The discovery of Mondini was next specially brought into 
prominence through Lazzaro Spallanzani. This renowned in- 
vestigator, in October, 1792, went from Pavia to the lagoons of 
the Po, near Comacchio, for the sole purpose of there studying 
the eel question. He remained at Comacchio through the au- 
tumn; he was, however, unable to find anything that was new 
regarding the question, but in the report upon his journey of 
investigation he entirely threw aside the discovery of Mondini, 
and announced that the ovaries discovered by this authority 
were simply fatty folds of the lining of the stomach.t 
It was without doubt this absolute negative statement of such 
a skilled investigator as Spallanzani which for a long time dis- 
couraged further investigations on the eel question, and allowed 
what had already been discovered to be regarded as doubtful, as 
finally to be forgotten. So when Professor Rathke, of Kénigs- 
berg, in his assiduous labors upon the reproductive organs of 
fishes, in the year 1824, described the ovaries of the eel as two 
cuff and collar shaped organs on both sides of the backbone, and 
in the year 1838 described them as new, he was everywhere in 
Germany (and to a large extent to the present day) regarded as 
*O. F, Muller, Bemuhungen, bei den Intestinal Wurmern. 
+Prof. G. B. Ercolani, of Bologna, and also Crivelli and Maggi, in their essays published 
in 1872, have rightly stated that Mondini’s priority of discovery has been overlooked in Ger- 
many. Neither Rathke nor Hohnbaum-Hornschech nor Schltiser have mentioned his work. 
S. Nillson, in his Skandinavisk Fauna, 1855, says nothing of Mondini. He mentioned as the 
first discoverer of the ovaries O. F. Miiller, while Cuvier, in his Historie Maurelle de 
Poissons,” assigning the honor rather to Rathke. Th. von Siebold is the first to announce in 
his work, published in 1863, Die Stisswasserfische Von Mitteluropa, page 349, that Mondini, 
almost contemporaneously with O. F. Miller, and independently from him, discovered the ova- 
ries of the eel. The error, as was discovered by Italian zodlogists later than by those of Germa- 
ny, arofe from the fact that the announcement of Miiller’s discovery was printed in 1780, while 
that of Mondini, which was made in 1777, was first printed in 1783. 
