Fishing from the earliest times - Blog

FALSE THEORIES OF EEL PROPAGATION 251Regardless they their future offspring leave,But porous sands the spumy drops receive.That genial bed impregnates all the heap,And little eelets soon begin to creep."Pliny, after making the assertion (taken, as usual, fromAristotle) that among fish the females are larger, and often themore numerous, goes on, an echo once more of " His Master'sVoice," to deny to the Eel sex, either masculine or feminine ;according to him, Eels when they had Hved their day, rubbedthemselves against the rocks, and their scrapings came to hfe :" they have no other mode of procreation." ^Von Helmont attributed the birth of Eels to the dews ofMay mornings ! other authors deduced their parentage fromthe hairs of horses ! others again from the gills of fish ! whilethe great Izaak Walton insisted on spontaneous generation !To solve the insoluble, recourse was, as usual, had to thegods : thus Jupiter and a white-armed goddess yclept Anguilla ^(the Latin for Eel) were accounted parents of the countless" cousins to the snake."Theory was piled upon theory, false conclusions were drawnfrom falser data. Even as late as 1862 appeared an author,not one whit less certain of the truth of his discovery based " ona series of observations extending over sixty years," or one whitless active in asserting it, than any of his numerous predecessors-In The Origin of the Silver Eel, Mr, D. Cairncross propoundedthe following assertion " : The progenitor of the silver Eel isa small beetle : of this I feel fully satisfied in my own mind,from a rigid and extensive comparison of its structure and^ Pliny, IX. 23 and 74, and X. 87. In IX. 38 he asserts that Eels alone ofall fish do not float when dead. Aristotle, who {N. H., VIII. 2) is, as usual.his authority, confines himself to noting this characteristic as not possessed" by the majority of fish," and accounts for it by the smallness of stomach,lack of water in it, and want of fat ; he states, however, that when fat they dofloat.^ Accuracy as to procreation was not Father Izaak's strong point, as histheory that pike were bred from pickerel weed shows. It was on this pointthat Richard Franck, author of Northern Memoirs (written in 1658, but unpublishedtill 1694), with the invincible contempt of the fly-fisher for the baitfisher,so jumped on Walton, that " he huffed away." See Sir H. Maxwell,op. cit., IV. 123.3 Robinson, op. cit., 73. This seems a bit of bogus mythology. PerhapsNatalis Comes may be responsible.2