Before passing over the Ionian Sea to observe what the Romans did in this field of activity, the quasi-scientific study of fishes among the Greeks, particularly that of Aristotle, should claim our attention. Compared with the work of the moderns Aristotle’s work was crude indeed. Estimated as the first attempts at building up a science his work deserves our admiration and, in view of the fact that his writings were standard for nearly two thousand years, it demands our respect. Aristotle did his work in natural history under the patronage of King Philip of Macedon, who drew upon the resources of the empire to provide him with rare or little known specimens from far and wide. How some of his conclusions were based on insufficient data and are consequently very inaccurate, or even grotesque, his discussion of the eel will illustrate. It must not be taken as a fair sample of his work in general. In fact, it is very unusual. “Among all the animals,” he says, “which have blood, the eel is the only one which is not born of copulation or hatched from eggs. The correctness of this statement is evident from the fact that eels make their appearance in marshy bodies of water, and that, too, after all the water has been drawn off and the mud removed, as soon as the rain-water begins to fill these lakes. They are not produced in dry weather, not even in lakes that never become dry, for they live on the rain-water. It is, therefore, plain that their origin is not due to procreation or to eggs. In spite of this some people think that they are viviparous, because worms have been found in the intestines of some eels, which they believe are the young of the eel. This opinion, however, is erroneous, for they are produced from the so-called ‘bowels of the earth’ (i. e., the earth-worms), the spontaneous product of mud and moisture.” Turning now to the Romans, we find a somewhat different state of affairs, but different only on the aesthetic side; from a scientific or industrial point of view the Roman, though heir to all the Greek civilization and learning, in this, as in many other lines, made but slight advances.