NOTES AND LITERATURE 



ICHTHYOLOGY 

 Life History of the Eel. 1 — The waters of the northeastern Atlan- 

 tic and of the adjacent North and Baltic Seas have been sub- 

 jected in recent years to a most elaborate and continuous in- 

 vestigation, thanks to government subsidies and international 

 cooperation. A coordinated study of the plankton and an in- 

 vestigation of the breeding habits and the young of the important 

 food fishes and of their migrations and movements, have made 

 up the large part of the ambitious program of this International 

 Commission. In the allotment of the field it has fallen to the 

 Danish Fisheries Bureau to undertake to complete our knowledge 

 of the life-history of the common eel. Dr. Johs. Schmidt, with 

 the aid of the Danish fisheries steamer Thor and Dr. Peter- 

 sen's young-fish trawl, has added a new, and almost final, chap- 

 ter in the solution of this mystery which has puzzled naturalists 

 for centuries. 



The suggestion of Dr. Theo. Gill in 1864 that the peculiar 

 ribbon-like fish known as Leptocephalus was the larva of the 

 Conger eel was subsequently verified by Dareste's (1874) ana- 

 tomical comparisons and Pelage's (188(5) successful rearing of 

 a Leptocephalus through its metamorphosis into the Conger eel. 

 It remained for the Italian zoologists Grassi and Calandruccio 

 to demonstrate in 1897 that the larva known as L< pt<>< < phalxs 

 brcvirostris was in reality the young of the common European 

 eel, AnguUla vulgaris. Their conclusions were based upon ana- 

 tomical comparisons, transitional stages, and experimental rear- 

 ing of the larval Leptocephalus to the young Anguilla. Most, 

 if not all, of the material upon which the work of the Italian 

 investigations were based was obtained at or near the Straits of 

 Messina where the famous whirlpools bring to the surface the 

 organisms of the deeper waters. 



The eel fisheries of northern Europe are widespread and in 

 places, especially in the Baltic Sea. they are extensive. There 

 were in 1881, 18,491 eel traps in operation along the Swedish 



'Contributions to the Life-History of the Eel (AnguUla vulgaris Turt.). 

 By Johs. Schmidt. Conseil Perm. International pour Expl. de la Mer. Bap- 



