thk family of eei.s. 
307 
come to a conclusion was that they formed a highly-esteemed 
and expensive article of fashionable food. Fish of all kinds 
were in high favour in Greece in the days of its prosperity, 
so that the word opson, which originally comprised every sort 
of food except broad, at last became applied only to fish; but 
the Eel was among the highest of these delicacies, and 
Aristophanes may be referred to, to shew that a sum equal to 
half a crown was demanded for an Eel which had been 
brought from Lake Copias, in Boeotia, which country was 
believed to produce them of the most delicious sort. And 
loud, as well as frequent were the denunciations raised against 
the fishmongers of these times, as being extortioners who took 
advantage of the luxurious cravings of their customers to their 
own extravagant profit. 
But there was at least a prominent exception to this bias 
in favour of these fish in an eminent people of antiquity, and 
the Egyptians held them even in abhorrence; for which the 
reason assigned by Herodotus is that in that country they 
were regarded as sacred to the deity of the Nile, but which 
Lucian appears to explain by intimating that some evil demon 
was embodied in tbefish; and this explanation is countenanced 
by what is said by Anaxandrides, the Ehodian poet, to an 
Figyptian: — 
“Ton fancy in the little Eel some power 
Of demon huge and terrible;” 
and it may have been for the same reason that Numa forbad 
its being offered on the altar of a god; while on the other- 
hand, as I quote from Bloch, the Boeotians, whose Eels were 
best esteemed, were accustomed to use them as sacred ofiferings. 
Whether its being tabooed as food in the Islands of the South 
Sea, (and the only fish that is so,) may be due to the same 
idea, derived from a remote ancestry, appears uncertain. 
With the ancients also the way in which the race was con- 
tinued was eminently a subject of doubt or mistake; as indeed 
it remained to a very modern date; and several writers of some 
eminence have been so far in error as to have mistaken parasitic 
animals in Eels, and even those of other fishes, for the young 
of these species. Lacepede believed them to be bred ivithin the 
body of the parent, although after diligent search he was not 
