UVRMlSiDM. 379 



they principally feed; and this knowledge furnishes a 

 clue, perhaps, to the right understanding of a passage in 

 Homer, which the critics, less accurate naturalists than 

 their author, have misinterpreted. When the body of 

 Asteropoeus is given up to the fish^ the eels appear to 

 come in as distinct claimants, — 



Now roll'd between the banks, it lies the food 

 Of curling eels, and fishes of the flood. 



Homer, however, was probably not ignorant of the prowl- 

 ing propensities of eels in the dark, and the expression 

 therefore denotes no more than that the body was eaten 

 by predatory fish during the day, and by eels at night. 



A few words may now be said on a much mooted 

 question, touching the wholesomeness or unwholesome- 

 ness of eels. In a fish so generally distributed, and so 

 omnivorously disposed, the quality of the flesh will of 

 course vary; and in some foul habitats really deserve 

 all the abuse which has been too indiscriminately la- 

 vished upon it by some respectable members alike of the 

 ancient and modern faculty, from Dr. Galen downwards 

 to Dr. Lyster : these, and a yet doughtier doctor than 

 either, Hippocrates, have aU proscribed eels, though 

 their proscription was not intended to be general, but 

 to be confined exclusively to certain classes of disease. 

 Hippocrates expressly says, ' this food must be forbid- 

 den in tabes and in diseased spleen;' and Galen thus 

 only prohibits it in nephritic complaints, where the 

 gluten might, he conceived, concrete gravel into stone.* 

 The cowls of Salerno, in their code of dietetics, join 

 heartily in these medical caveats against eels, and add 

 that ' doctors of every age have agreed to decry them 



* Beet-root was said to render this mucus soluble, which ex- 

 plains the exclamation of a devoted admirer of the dish — ' I will 

 never be separated from you, my eels, cooked in beet ! ' 



