Chap. IY. 
ELECTRIC EELS. 
291 
of a few yards, and had the appearance of having been 
made by the hand of man. The smallest were about 
two feet, the largest seven or eight feet in diameter. 
As we approached the most considerable of the larger 
ones, I was startled at seeing a number of large serpent- 
like heads bobbing above the surface. They proved to 
be those of electric eels, and it now occurred to me that 
these round holes were made by these animals working 
constantly round and round in the moist muddy soil. 
Their depth (some of them were at least eight feet 
deep) was doubtless due also to the movements of the 
eels in the soft soil, and accounted for their not drying 
up, in the fine season, with the rest of the creek. Thus, 
whilst alligators and turtles in this great inundated 
forest region retire to the larger pools during the dry 
season, the electric eels make for themselves little ponds 
in which to pass the season of drought. 
My companions now cut each a stout pole, and pro- 
ceeded to eject the eels in order to get at the other fishes, 
with which they had discovered the ponds to abound. 
I amused them all very much by showing how the 
electric shock from the eels could pass from one person 
to another. We joined hands in a line whilst I touched 
the biggest and freshest of the animals on the head with 
the point of my hunting-knife. We found that this 
experiment did not succeed more than three times with 
the same eel when out of the water : for, the fourth time, 
the shock was scarcely perceptible. All the fishes found 
in the holes (besides the eels) belonged to one species, a 
small kind of Acari, or Loricaria, a group whose members 
have a complete bony integument. Lino and the boy 
u 2 
