MUEiENID^. 373 



offspring.' He thinks also that their origin, as the Greek 

 name indeed denotes, is from the mud. Pliny's theory 

 was, that when eels had lived their day they instinctively 

 rubbed themselves to pieces against the rocks, and that 

 out of the living detritus issued a new brood : a mode of 

 generation which in some lower animal organizations 

 actually takes place. Many as implicitly believed this 

 ingenious hypothesis, as children duly instructed believe 

 that an effete moon is cut up into stars, and that the 

 monthly succession of old ones has gradually been fill- 

 ing the sky with these lesser luminaries ever since the 

 world began to the present hour. Some, dissatisfied 

 with such explanations, observing how easily Virgil 

 contrived to fiU his bee-hives from the carcase of a 

 heifer, and not seeing why if bees were so generated 

 fish might not be also, affirmed that eels came from the 

 dead bodies of animals after long immersion in water. 

 Others again modified this notion, and supposed that 

 only the hairs of a horse's tail,* soaked a sufficient time, 

 would at last adapt themselves to a new element and 

 become eels.f Finally, some ancient naturalists, find- 

 ing the terrestrial origin of eels obscure, had recourse to 

 the skies, and attributed this multitudinous race to Ju- 

 piter and a white-armed goddess named AnguiUa ; ac- 

 cordingly, Archestratus, in his description of an Attic 

 feast, introduces AnguUla, boasting of her Jove-sprung 

 offspring. 



In much later times. Van Helmont attributed the birth 

 of eels to the dews of May mornings ; whilst not a few 



* MigM not sucli a popiilar superstition of liair passing into 

 snakes have originated tlie singular tresses of Medusa ? 



t Singularly enough, to this day it is a popular superstition in 

 Sicily that one of the common snakes of the country owes its 

 being to a prolonged maceration of this appendage in water, and 

 many a peasant wiU engage, 'for a consideration,' actually to show 

 the incredulous the process of transformation. 



