April 27, 1882 | : 
NATURE 
ona 
Dallmer, of Schleswig, Inspector of Fisheries in that 
province, offered to transmit communications to Berlin, 
and in 1878 he published an interesting report of the 
proceedings. Quite beyond all his expectations, his 
wishes had been made known by the press to all the 
regions between the Rhine and the Weichsel, and from 
the Alps to the sea. The number of letters which he 
received at first gratified him, next surprised him, and 
_ finally so terrified him, that at last he was obliged to 
refuse to atterd to communications. Prof. Virchow also 
received an incredible amount of letters from all parts of 
Germany, and in a little time Prof. Virchow too was com- 
felled to publish a notice urgently requesting no more 
communications to be sent to him, for that he did not 
know what to do with those he had got. 
Althcugh a few links are still wanting to complete the 
chain of the life-history of the eel, it may be most safely 
assumed that the eel lays its eggs like the majority of 
fishes, and further, that, like the lamprey, it only spawns 
once and then dies. It would also seem most probable 
that the spawning takes place only in the sea. Eels 
placed in land-locked ponds, though they increase in size, 
never, it is well known, increase in numbers. The most 
important problem still to be solved is, do the male eels 
ever leave the sea and enter fresh water. Dr. Jacoby 
found male eels in the lagoons of Commachio, where the 
water is brackish, and these must have ascended in the | 
mounting as fry, and then, probably, at the approach of 
sexual maturity, descended with the females to the sea. 
Dr. Hermes found some I1 per cent. of males among eels 
taken at Willenberg on the Elbe coast, 120 miles from 
the German Ocean, and no males whatever at Havelberg, 
twenty or thirty miles higher up the stream. Thus the 
numerical percentage of males to females was in propor- 
tion to the nearness to the sea. 
In connection with this subject the valuable observa- | n 1 
| of their own interests. 
tions of Dr. Hermes on the conger, made during 1881, in 
the tanks of the Berlin Aquarium, may well be alluded to. 
Dr. Hermes found the reproductive organ in the conger 
very similar to those as now supposed to exist in the 
common eel, and in_the comparison of size the relations 
remain the same. The male congers are much smaller 
than the females. 
Space will not allow us to do more than refer to the 
journey of Dr. Jacoby in 1877, from Trieste, by way of 
Ravenna, to Commachio; nor to his account of the 
sterile females of a delicious flavour, known as Pasciuti ; 
but we would suggest that no more satisfactory or useful 
work could be translated than Jacoby’s “ History of the 
Eel: with an Account of the Celebrated Eel Fishery of 
Commachio ;” which was issued from the Berlin firm of 
August Herschwald, not very long ago, 
SIR HENRY COLE, K.C.B. 
ENRY COLE, the eldest son of Captain Henry 
Robert Cole, was born at Bath, on July 15, 1808. 
On January 12, 1817, he was admitted to Christ’s Hos- 
pital, where he remained until April 9, 1823. There 
had been some idea of sending him into the Church, but | 
it was abandoned, and the day after he left school he | 
commenced his career in the public service, under Mr. 
Cohen, afterwards Sir Francis Palgrave. His leisure at 
this time was spent in botanising in the neighbourhood of | 
London ; drawing under the tuition of David Cox, and 
contributing to the public journals, On December 28, 
1833, he married his cousin, Miss Marian Bond. The 
public records were endangered by the burning of 
the Houses of Parliament in the following year. 
Cole worked vigorously for their preservation at the 
time, and was for long afterwards engaged in their 
arrangement. In spite of these heavy labours he had 
found time to commence a work on light, shade, and 
colour, when the prosperity of the young manager was 
abruptly interrupted by his summary dismissal from the 
Augmentation Office on December 5, 1835. He had 
ventured to call in question, and that in the singularly 
emphatic manner which characterised him through life, 
the competency of his official superiors, and had indi- 
cated the gross mismanagement which then obtained. 
It was believed that Mr. Cole’s charges were unfounded, 
but a Committee of the House of Commons fully 
justified his action. He was at once reinstated in his 
office and advanced to be assistant keeper of the Records. 
At this period of his career he did yeoman’s service 
to the cause of postal reform, and found leisure to issue, 
under the om de plume of Felix Summerly, a series of 
Guide Books to Hampton Court, Canterbury, Westminster 
Abbey, Temple Church, the National Gallery, Free Pic- 
ture Galleries, Day Excursions, Holidays spent in and 
near London, as well as to the various lines of Railway 
as they sprang into existence. Besides these he published 
his long-deferred “ Light, Shade, and Colour,’’ and it is 
one of the features of his life that he uniformly dropped 
a scheme which was for the time abortive, and uniformly 
took it up again at the relinquished point when a more 
propitious time arrived. He also wrote numerous works 
for the amusement and instruction of children in whose 
service he enlisted some of the most eminent artists then 
living. He found employment for ladies in engraving 
his illustrations, thus making an early attempt to solve 
the difficult problem of woman’s work. 
About this time his artistic sensibilities were shocked 
at the native hideousness of British manufactures, and 
he became a member of the Society of Arts, into the 
| fossilised bones of which he soon instilled a new vigour. 
Still it was with the greatest difficulty that the leading 
manufacturers could be induced to co-operate. A prize 
competition was projected, but they dreaded to permit 
their names to appear, so jealous were the retail traders 
At last the show of Art Manutac- 
tures came off, and Henry Cole gained the silver medal 
| of the Society of Arts for his “ Felix Summerly” tea 
service. This success he followed up by a plan for the 
regeneration of British art applied to industry by the 
establishment of quinquennial exhibitions of British 
manufactures to commence in 1851. He commenced the 
issue of the Journal of Design to disseminate his views, 
and to gain information he visited the exhibition held in 
France in 1849. On his return he submitted his draft 
project to Prince Albert, by whom it was favourably 
received; the design grew, and expanded from a pro- 
jected national exhibition to be held on the then waste 
ground of Leicester Square into the Great Exhibition of 
All Nations in Hyde Park. The conception was novel, 
and friends were timorous—fights hard and frequent 
enough to have subdued a less resolute will fell to Cole’s 
lot—but by dint of a bull-dog refusal to be beaten, he 
ultimately assured the successful issue of the vast under- 
taking. The results gained by that success surround us 
on every hand in the improved taste of the country, as 
well in important as trivial matters. This is apparent 
when the manufactures of to-day are compared with those 
endured by our fathers. ; 
At the conclusion of the Exhibition he had the satis- 
faction to see the purchase of a small collection of objects 
chiefly from the Indian court. These, with the drawings 
from the schools of design, were lodged in Marlborough 
House as the nucleus of a possible national art repository, 
which has been since realised in the South Kensington 
Museum. d 
Mr. Cole was, in 1852, appointed General Superinten- 
dent of the Department of Practical Art, which was suc- 
ceeded in the following year by the Department of 
Science and Art, and it devolved upon him to reorganise 
the desultory instruction which had up to that time been 
afforded by the Schools of Design. How ably he, with 
the invaluable assistance of Mr. Richard Redgrave, R.A., 
