Nevertheless the eel—the common fresh-water eel—is still valued on the Continent, as is proved by the fact that the German Imperial Government has recently sent an important official of the Fisheries Department to Gloucester in order to make extensive purchases of the “elvers,” or young eels which come up the river Severn in millions at this season. The purpose of the German fisheries officials is to place many hundred thousands of these young eels in German rivers which are not so well supplied by natural immigration as is the Severn, and by so doing to increase the supply of well-grown eels hereafter in the river fisheries of North Germany. This interesting practical attempt to increase the supply of eels in Germany will be further appreciated when I relate what has been discovered within the last twenty years as to the reproduction, migrations, and habits of the common fresh-water eel. It has been known, time out of mind, that in the early months of every year millions of young eels a little over two inches in length, called “elvers” in English and “civelles” in French, come up the estuaries of the rivers of Europe in a dense body. They are so closely packed together as the narrower parts of the stream are reached, that thousands may be taken out of the water by merely dipping a bucket into the ranks of the procession. I obtained a few thousand of these “elvers” lately from the Severn and placed them on exhibition in the central court of the Natural History Museum in London. The Anglo-Saxon name “eel-fare” is given to this annual march or “swim” of the young eels from the sea to the fresh waters. Though riverside folk have never doubted that the elvers are young eels which have been hatched from spawn deposited by parent eels in the sea, and are “running up” to feed and grow to maturity in the rivers and streams inland, yet country folk away from the big rivers have queer notions as to the origin and breeding of eels. They catch large, plump eels a couple of feet long in stagnant ponds hundreds of miles from the sea, far from rivers, and more than a thousand feet above the sea-level. They have no notion that those eels originally “ran up” as little eels from the sea, nor that many of them make their way across wet grass and by rain-filled ditches back to the rivers and to the sea when they are seven years old. But that is now known to be the fact. Just as there are fish, like the salmon, which “run down” to the sea to feed and grow big and “run up” to breed in the small pools and rivulets far from the river’s mouth, so there are other fishes, of which the eel is one, which run up to feed and grow and run down to breed—that is to say, to deposit and fertilise their eggs in the depths of the ocean.