NOVEMBER 273 



man, albeit the root-meanings of these may be far from 

 scientific. Thus the common name 'eel' is but a con- 

 tracted form of the scientific title of the fish — anguilla ; 

 and, by going far enough back, we can trace the meaning 

 to be ' the choker,' which seems inapplicable enough to 

 the habits of this slippery customer. It has come about 

 in this way. In the remote past, Aryan man came to 

 associate the sound agh, nasalised angh, with the idea of 

 choking. That property in snakes which seems to have 

 impressed him most was neither the poisonous fangs nor 

 the forked tongue nor the prostrate posture, but the 

 power of the largest of them to squeeze. So he came to 

 denote the big snake as aghi or anghi, the choker, just as, 

 by a similar mental process, modern men of science have 

 designated it Boa constrictor — the choker par excellence. 

 Smaller snakes required a diminutive appellation ; hence 

 the Sanscrit term aghla or anghla, appearing in Latin 

 as anguilla, the diminutive of unguis, as in Greek the 

 two words persisted in e;;^*? and 6yxe^v<;, respectively 

 signifying a snake and an eel. In like manner, through 

 all branches of Germanic speech — Anglo-Saxon, English, 

 German, Icelandic, and so on— the eel is ineradicably 

 'the little snake'; and it is not every nation that has 

 rid itself of repulsion for a creature which, in its very 

 name, as well as by its appearance, stirs the instinctive 

 horror for snakes which is born in every son of man. Of 

 course, this is pm-e nonsense. Englishmen have dis- 

 covered long ago that eels are palatable and nutritious 

 food. Scotsmen, on the other hand, forego the legitimate 

 profits that might be derived from eel-fisheries in every 

 part of their land, and allow the Dutchmen to send over 

 hundreds of tons of eels to the EngUsh markets. 



