132 Tue Ottawa NarTurRALIST. [October — 
A few weeks ago, during a short holiday at Fort William, 
P. Q., on the Ottawa River, about 120 miles above the Capital, 
I noticed examples in a pond about a mile from the Fort. A week 
later in a sand-pool, 6 or 8 inches across, which had been dug by 
some children the evening before, I obtained a specimen. In this 
newly excavated pool, only an inch or two deep, and thirty or 
forty yards {rom the Hotel Pontiac, the hair-eel appeared actively 
undulating and twisting about in characteristic fashion. Gren- 
acher’s paper ‘‘ Zur Anatomie der Gattung Gordius” happened to 
be in my hands at the time, and I resumed the study of this 
curious creature after the lapse of many years. : 
Villot’s monograph (‘‘ Monographie des Dragonneaux”), in 
which a detailed account of Gordius is given, had also been 
recently consulted by me. 
My specimen was almost exactly 12 inches in length anda ~ 
little over ,4, of an inch in thickness. Its smooth hard hair-like 
body, without distinctive head, and its uncanny contortions, sug- 
gested, at once, an animated horse-hair. It was engaged un- 
ceasingly in winding itself into endless gracefully curved knots, 
and as constantly unwinding itself. The Gordian knot of classica, 
tradition was not more tortuously twisted, and the generic name 
Gordius seems very appropriate. 
Observations have shown that these creatures will survive if 
removed from water and dried. Doubt has been cast on the 
somewhat venerable story that the Abbé Fontana kept a hair-eel 
ina drawer for three years, and that at the end of that time it was 
dry and hard, and exhibited no sign of life; but, on putting it 
into water, it very soon recovered its former vigorous activity. 
On the authority of the distinguished Professor Alexander Mac- 
alister, this traditional story is confirmed. ‘‘ They are remark- 
able,” he says, ‘‘for their tenacity of life, as they can be dried 
into hard, brittle threads, and yet appear lively and active on being 
moistened."’ Some author, whose name I cannot just now recall, 
tells of a museum curator who observed a hair-eel emerge from 
the body of a beetle which had long been killed, dried, and put 
away in a cabinet, 
