Plato compares Socrates to the fish from his capability of electrifying his audience in the strict, but not in the corrupt present-day sense of the word, as some writers imagine. The comparison to the fish in _Meno_ 80A illustrates the benumbing effect of the Socratic method on the thought and talk (τὴν ψυχὴν καὶ τὸ στόμα ναρκῶ) of Meno (and others), so that he was μεστὸς ἀπορίας, and reduced to silence (οὐκ ἔχω ὅ τι ἀποκρίνωμαι). If limited to the electric fire which flashed from his eyes, the comparison is complimentary to the philosopher, but, if applied to the whole face, is, even if true, quite the reverse. The thirty odd busts still extant of Socrates hand down to us an ugly, flat face with pig’s-eyes, all characteristic of the _Torpedo narke_.[416] Ælian (IX. 14) indulges in wondrous stories gleaned from his mother and _viris peritis_ of the permeation of the electric shock. Did one but touch the net in which the fish was taken, lo! he was cramp-bound. If some enquiring observer placed a pregnant torpedo in a vase of sea-water, his fate, did but a drop fall on leg or arm, was similar, but the fish, even though this virtue had gone out of her, in due season became a mother! According to Mr. Lones, Oppian, Ælian, to whom (V. 37) we owe the specific for immunity when handling the fish, _viz._ “the liquor of Cyrene,” Theophrastus, all exaggerate the powers of the Torpedo. A most interesting account is given in Athenæus (VII. 95), who avers that the shock was not produced by all parts of the fish’s body, but by certain parts only, and that Diphilus of Laodicea had proved this by a long series of experiments.[417] According to Galen and Dioscorides the shock, whence or however obtained, relieved chronic headache, while a contemporary of the latter recommends a person suffering from gout in the feet to stand “bare-legged” on the shore, and apply the Torpedo. As the German and Austrian watering places are still under a cloud, we may yet see on the shores of Italy bands of gouty and passionate pilgrims standing bare-legged, awaiting the cure of the νάρκη! Complaints of gout are rife, even among our fish-affecting epigrammatists. From Hedylus, a singer rather of wine than of fish, we trace the lineage of the disease, “of Bacchus the limb-loosener, and of Venus the limb-loosener, is sprung a daughter, a limb-loosener, the Gout”![418] As to spawning, every author from Herodotus down to Izaak Walton has evolved various but mostly inaccurate theories. Oppian (I. 479 ff.) lays down that, as the passion of Love overcomes fish, the bodies of the male and female meet in the water and “exude mingled slime,” which swallowed by the female produces conception. To this (I. 554 ff.) he allows an exception in the case of the _murænæ_. These mate with land serpents, “who for a time lay aside their venom”: a monstrous connection which finds affirmation by Sostratus[419] and by Pliny.[420]