412 The Sea Lamprey. 



Naucrates, Remora, or Echeneis, which, when it pleased, laid 

 hold of a ship, and by means of a magical power which it 

 possessed, and which was inscrutable by human intellect, and 

 therefore above being reasoned on, it was able to arrest its 

 progress in the midst of its most onward course, and thus 

 fix it stationary in the middle of the ocean. Ordinary obser- 

 vation had shown that the lamprey was in the habit of lay- 

 ing hold of a ship so firmly as not to be easily separated from 

 it ; and without attending to the difference in the mode of 

 acting, by what seemed a natural process of reasoning they 

 drew the conclusion that where the action was so much alike 

 the fishes themselves must be the same. These dissimilar fishes, 

 therefore, the Remora and Lamprey, became confounded toge- 

 ther, and that, indeed, to such an extent, that when taken in 

 the sea there is reason to believe that the lamprey lost, if 

 it ever possessed, a specific name ; which circumstance will 

 help to explain how it happens that there does not appear to 

 be any direct mention of it in the natural history of Pliny, 

 although the fish itself is common in the Tiber. The fact, 

 however, of the knowledge of this fish by the ancients, with 

 the uncertainty arising from confounding it with the Remora, 

 Naucrates, or Echeneis, appears with little doubt, from the 

 description which Oppian gives of the last named species. His 

 reference to its teeth is decisive in this respect, for these organs 

 in the Naucrates are scarcely perceptible, and certainly are not 

 employed in the action which rendered this fish so famous : — 



" Slender his shape, his length a cubit ends ; 

 No beauteous spot the gloomy race commends ; 

 An eel-like clinging kind, of dusky looks ; 

 His jaws display tenacious rows of hooks. 

 But in strange power the puny fish excels, 

 Beyond the boasted art of magic spells. — 

 The sucking fish beneath with secret chains 

 Clung to the keel the swiftest ship detains." 



When, however, the lamprey had come under the notice of 

 another class of observers in its yearly migration into fresh 

 water, its marine practices were forgotten or unknown, and it 

 assumed a name according to the likeness it was supposed to 

 bear to some more familiarly-known fish. Ray, in his little 

 work, Nomenclcetor Classicus, very properly finds fault with 

 those English writers, especially the poets, who translated the 

 Latin name of the fish Murama, by the English term Lamprey, 

 which John Jones, the translator of Oppian, always does, 

 although these fishes are different in every respect. But we have 

 already remarked that scientific differences were little thought 

 of by the generality of the ancients. It was sufficient for them 

 that there was some, although a distant resemblance ; and in 



