Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

—250 TACKLE- CURIOUS METHODS—SILURUS—EELSappealed strongly, to judge by the eulogy that their bodieswhen being cooked exhaled an odour fragrant enough to restorethe sense of smell in the nose of a dead man ! while, if boiledin fine brine, they " changed the human nature into the" ^divine !The luxurious and lazy Sybarites, who felt they had brokentheir bones if they but saw another digging, and suffered not acock in the whole country, lest he should mar their slumber,were so passionately addicted to Eels that all persons catchingor selling them were exempt from taxes and tribute. 2(C) The propagation of Eels : This has given birth to moretheories—all of them till some twenty years ago quite erroneous—than any other ichthyic question. From Aristotle downwardsnearly every zoologist, nearly every writer on fish, has advancedhis view as to how and whence eels are bred.^Only a few of them, and they all divergent, can find spacehere. Aristotle held that Eels had never been found withmilt or roe, that when opened they did not seem to possessgenerative organs, and that apparently they came from theso-called entrails of the earth, seemingly referring to certainworms formed spontaneously in mud and the like.*Oppian (I. 513 ff.)—" Strange the formation of the eely raceThat know no sex, yet love the close embrace.Their folded lengths they round each other twine,Twist amorous knots, and slimy bodies joyn ;Till the close strife brings off a frothy juice.The seed that must the wiggling kind produce.^ Badham, op. cit., 392.2 Athenaeus, XII. 15 and 20. If the fish found favour heHuously, medicallycondemnation attended it. Hippocrates warns against its use ; Seneca, Nat.Qu., III. 19, 3, terms it " gravis cibus." If to the gastronomic virtues of theMurcenidiB both Greeks and Latins were more than kind, to other characteristicsthey were far indeed from blind^ e.g. their slipperiness, etc., was proverbial.See Lucian, Anach., i, and Plautvis, Pseud., II. 4, 57. Further, did the fish buthap in a dream, then good-bye to all hopes and desires, which slipped away,as surely as Alice's " slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe." SeeArtemidorus, Oneirocritica, II. 14. The phallic character of the fish prevalentin ancient times continues in modern Italy, e.g. the proverbs (i) aboutholding an Eel by his tail, and (2) that when it has taken the hook, it must gowhere it is drawn. De Gubernatis, op. cit., II. 341.3 For the many classical theories on Eel procreation see Schneider, op. cit.,pp. 36 ff.« Aristotle, H. A.,lY.ii.