Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/268

256 the large sum of a hundred shillings in a dish of eels." Anyone who could now sit down to cope with a dish of eels of the value of five pounds would indeed have gastronomic capabilities likely to make an alderman die of envy. But, in the eating of eels, excellent as they are, it is well to remember the advice given in the ancient medical book entitled "Regimen Sanitatis Salerniæ":

 Who knows not physic should be nice and choice In eating eels, because they hurt the voice. Both eels and cheese, without good store of wine Well drunk with them, offend at any time."

For a long time the most extraordinary theories were accepted regarding the birth of young eels. Aristotle believed they sprang from the mud (wherein he was not far wrong, as eels deposit their spawn in mud and sand); Pliny maintained that young eels developed from fragments separated from the parents' bodies by rubbing against rocks; others supposed that they proceeded from the carcasses of animals; Helmont declared that they came from May-dew, and gave the following receipt for obtaining them: "Cut up two turfs covered with May-dew, and lay one upon the other, the grassy side inward, and then expose them to the heat of the sun; in a few hours there will spring from them an infinite quantity of eels." Of that ancient superstition of one's childhood that horse-hairs cut up and deposited in water would turn into eels it is hardly necessary to speak, for who can not remember those unpleasant little bottles, erst used for medicine, which garnished one's nursery, in which the propagation of eels from horse-hair was carried on with the profound faith of childhood? Eels generally shed their spawn in April, and, when not hindered, they almost invariably choose an estuary, where they scatter the spawn loosely in the sand or soil. But that an annual visit to the sea is by no means necessary to their existence is proved by the fact that many eels who inhabit inland ponds and lakes never visit the sea at all. A gentleman digging in the month of October in the gravel-banks of the river Stour found the place "alive with young eels, some of them scarcely hatched, at the depth of from five to fifteen inches"; and at one of the meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science a member stated that he had seen a considerable number of young eels rise up through a small opening in the sand at the bottom of a small stream, the Ravensbourne. The greater number of eels, however, do visit the sea, and the "passing up" a river of the young eels is one of the most curious sights of natural history. This passage of young eels is called eelfare on the banks of the Thames; and it has been thought by some that the term elver, which on the banks of the Severn is used indiscriminately for all young eels, is a corruption of the word eelfare. In the Thames this eelfare takes place in the spring, in other