Fishes. 531 



shallows or partial concealment in which they spent their earliest life, 

 they are comparatively safe from the eel. When the trout seeks the 

 shallows for the purpose of preying on the minnow, he dashes upon 

 them with repeated charges until he has satisfied his appetite ; and 

 his rush is sometimes made with such violence that he risks running 

 himself aground. The minnows, in the mean time, strive in various 

 ways to escape ; sometimes, if the shoal be large, throwing themselves 

 into a mass, which moves with a kind of whirling motion that percep- 

 tibly raises the surface of the water, and seems to be produced by the 

 efforts of each individual to reach the interior of the crowd. Now I 

 have never seen anything of this kind in which the eel was actor. I 

 have seen him going quietly down- stream among a number of min- 

 nows, who made way for him, I allow, — " gave him the wall ; " but 

 certainly did not seem to fear him as likely to take the edge off his ap- 

 petite by lunching on one or two of them : while he for his part moved 

 on, turning neither to the right nor left, and paying no kind of atten- 

 tion to the small gentry around him. At the very time I saw the 

 eel hunting the loach, there were hundreds of minnows and small fry 

 not five feet from him ; but he limited his attention to the investiga- 

 tion of what might happen to be concealed by the stones. Moreover, 

 to recur once more to my school-boy days. I was one of a firm num- 

 bering two or three partners. My department was eel-catching, as I 

 have said ; my partner's attention was turned to the capture of the 

 pike. For this purpose he set trimmers with live baits : these baits 

 were not disabled from swimming, and although it was out of their 

 power to escape the pike, they did seem able to avoid the eel : for I 

 do not remember one single instance in which an eel was taken on my 

 friend's hooks. It may be — and I confess I think it was so — that 

 the eel did not attempt to take the live fish. But either way, so far 

 from making any difference in my supposition as to the time at which 

 the eel destroys the young of other fish, it on the contrary serves to 

 confirm it. For if the eel be unable to catch a poor maimed gudgeon, 

 weighed down by a heavy hook and impeded in all its motions by the 

 line attached, how is it to seize on a lively, unhurt, untrammelled fish ? 

 If we suppose it able, but unwilling, — though there would be mighty 

 little unwillingness were the bait quite instead of half dead, — what is 

 it which changes its inclination in other cases ? T do not assert that 

 the eel will in no case prey upon a live fish ; for I know it does. But 

 I believe that he does not seize them a la nage : although if he sur- 

 prises one in such a situation that it cannot escape (for instance, the 

 loach under the stone), or if one swims as it were into his jaws — as he 



