Page:The naturalist on the River Amazons 1863 v2.djvu/309

 of a few yards, and had the appearance of having been made by the hand of man. The smallest were about two feet, the largest seven or eight feet in diameter. As we approached the most considerable of the larger ones, I was startled at seeing a number of large serpent-like heads bobbing above the surface. They proved to be those of electric eels, and it now occurred to me that these round holes were made by these animals working constantly round and round in the moist muddy soil. Their depth (some of them were at least eight feet deep) was doubtless due also to the movements of the eels in the soft soil, and accounted for their not drying up, in the fine season, with the rest of the creek. Thus, whilst alligators and turtles in this great inundated forest region retire to the larger pools during the dry season, the electric eels make for themselves little ponds in which to pass the season of drought.

My companions now cut each a stout pole, and proceeded to eject the eels in order to get at the other fishes, with which they had discovered the ponds to abound. I amused them all very much by showing how the electric shock from the eels could pass from one person to another. We joined hands in a line whilst I touched the biggest and freshest of the animals on the head with the point of my hunting-knife. We found that this experiment did not succeed more than three times with the same eel when out of the water: for, the fourth time, the shock was scarcely perceptible. All the fishes found in the holes (besides the eels) belonged to one species, a small kind of Acarí, or Loricaria, a group whose members have a complete bony integument. Lino and the boy