Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

a rough self-made microscope of the scales of a large tame carp,he counted the component scale-layers lying one above the other,"as if glued together," and found without exception thata new layer larger than the one of the preceding year is added.The carp, accidentally killed when forty years old, possessedforty such layers in each scale. He adds pathetically—anticipatingperhaps Lytton's——SCALE-READING 2000 YEARS OLD 109" A Reformer, a creed by posterity learntA century after its author is burnt "that " many people accused me of telling lies on the matter !" 1One cannot help being struck with acute astonishmentthat for over the 2000 years between Aristotle and Leeuwenhoekwe obtain, with the exception 2 of nine words in Pliny (IX.33), Senectutis indicium squamarum duritia, qucB non suntomnibus similes, cribbed and condensed, as was often his wont,from Aristotle, Httle, if any, addition to our knowledge ofscale-reading.The ancient authors either ignore or are ignorant of it.Nowhere, not even in that close observer Oppian, that omnivorousreader Athenaeus, that pleasant purloiner ^Elian, dowe read a single Hne on the subject. But our astonishment,even if we allow for absence of microscope, grows acuter, whenwe are met in the three most important Ichthyologists beforethe eighteenth century, Belon, Salviani, and Rondolet, withthe same silence.And this fate of silence apparently prevails even afterLeeuwenhoek's book ; his discovery seems to have been lostor remained dormant in his pages till a score of years ago.Had microscopes existed in his day, we may surely surmisethat Aristotle would have perfected the system of scalereading,and thus have come down to posterity with his title1 In Epistolce physiologiccB (Delft, 1719), IV. p. 401, he describes how thesquamulcs or scalelets of a herring (twelve years old) were found regularlysuperimposed, each year's growth on that of the preceding year.2 Athenaeus, referring, however, solely to the Murex, " their growth isshown by the rings on their scales," is simply quoting from Aristotle (asDindorf's text makes plain), whose term of six years he adopts :