516 AMERICAN FISHES. 
a hermaphrodite! Such were a few of the hypotheses promulgated. But 
the truth is almost as strange as the fictions. 
There are the usual sexes, and the usual piscine organs of generation 
become eventually developed. But it is only in the salt water that the 
ovaries of the females become fully matured, and then they may become 
large, almost to bursting. For the most part, it is in deep water that the 
females meet the males. This meeting takes place in winter, and then 
the eggs are dropped and fertilized. In due time they are hatched, and 
the fry soon assume a translucent ribbon-like form, and this they retain 
for some time. 
Leptocephalus grassii, the larva of the American Eel, Anguilla chrisypa, Nat. size. 
Head and hind end enlarged. 
Then they gradually, within a year, pass from the colorless translucent 
ribbon-like form into another stage, developing, as they do so, the pigment 
cells and shrinking or growing smaller till they obtain the cylindrical eel-like 
form and become “ Elvers” or Eels in miniature. Later those that are to 
become females assemble together in immense schools, and ascend the 
rivers, some going straight up as far as they can go, and others diverging 
into the tributary streams which they come to while hugging the banks. In 
the streams, lakes, and ponds in which they finally settle, they grow until 
the impulse that Nature has implanted in them to descend toward the seas 
becomes urgent, and then they repeat the experience of their ancestors of 
countless thousands of generations. 
The several early stages of the Eel from the most characteristic lepto- 
cephalus form to the earliest eel-formed state are represented in the accom- 
panying figures reproduced after Grassi’s figures for the European Eel and 
after Eigenmann and Kennedy’s memoir for the American. All are of 
natural size except the view of the head showing the peculiar deciduous 
teeth. 
While this descent is being made, they refuse food. Jacoby examined 
“many hundreds,” caught during their downward movement, and “found 
stomach and intestines entirely empty; that the Eels during their migra- 
tions eat nothing is also known to all fishermen and watermen of Comac- 
chio,” a great Eel-farm in northern Italy. 
