The eel may be taken as an example of our ignorance of fish life. Do our professed naturalists know anything about it beyond its migratory habits?—habits which, from sheer ignorance, have at one period or another been guessed as pertaining to all kinds of fish. The tendency to the romantic, specially exhibited in the amount of travelling power bestowed by the elder naturalists on this class of animals, would seem to be very difficult to put down. About two years ago an old story about the eel was gravely revived by having the larger portion of a little book devoted to its elucidation—an old story seriously informing us that the silver eel is the product of a black beetle. But no one need wonder at a new story about the eel, far less at the revival of this old one; for the eel is a fish that has at all times experienced the greatest difficulty in obtaining recognition as being anything at all in the animal world, or as having respectable parentage of even the humblest kind. In fact, the study of the natural history of the eel has been hampered by old-world romances and quaint fancies about its birth, or, in its case, may I not say invention? “The eel is born of the mud,” said one old author. “It grows out of hairs,” said another. “It is the creation of the dews of evening,” exclaimed a third. “Nonsense,” emphatically uttered a fourth controversialist, “it is produced by means of electricity.” “You are all wrong,” sserted a fifth, “the eel is generated from turf;” and a sixth theorist, determined to outdo all the others and come nearer the mark than any of his predecessors, assures the public that the young fish are grown from particles scraped off the old ones! The beetle theorist tells us that the silver eel is a neuter, having neither milt nor roe, and is therefore quite incapable of perpetuating its kind; and, in short, that it is a romance of nature, being _one_ of the productions of some wondrous lepidopterous animals seen by Mr. Cairncross (the author of the work alluded to) about the place where he lived in Forfarshire, its other production being of its own kind, a black beetle! The story of the rapid growth and transformation of the salmon is—as will by and by be seen—wonderful enough in its way, but it is certainly far surpassed by the extraordinary silver eel, which is at one and the same time a fish and an insect.