eautiful and wonderful
than fiction. Those who will turn to the great Book of Nature humbly,
and with an open mind, will learn nothing but what is helpful and good
to know.

The story which I am now about to relate is full of strangeness, far
more so than our forebears ever suspected. Thus, in many parts of rural
England even to-day, if you ask old grey-beards where eels come from,
they will tell you that they grow out of the hair dropped from the tails
of horses which come to drink at the horse-pond. After long soaking
these hairs, they say, become endowed with life, and turn to worms known
as 'hair-eels,' because they are so thin. In course of time they grow
into fully developed eels!--and this was solemnly believed, even by
educated people, throughout the length and breadth of the land, until a
few years ago.

The true story is not easy to tell, because it had to be put together
bit by bit. Thus it began in a suspicion of the truth. So long ago as
1864 a guess was made that certain curious, very rare, and extremely
fragile fishes were really young eels, in spite of the fact that they
did not in the least resemble eels such as we know; and so the matter
rested till 1896, when the guess was confirmed. The little creatures of
which we speak are almost transparent, very flat from side to side; they
have ridiculously tiny heads, and no fins, except a fringe running from
the middle of the back, round the tail, and forwards to the middle of
the under surface of the body. They are so transparent that the spine
and blood-vessels can be plainly seen against the light. Their strange
history was discovered by some scientific men in Italy, who found that
sometimes mighty currents boil up from the depths of the Straits of
Messina, bringing with them samples of the strange inhabitants of those
dark waters, and among these were hundreds of our little fish. Many of
these were quite unhurt, and being placed in an aquarium, throve
wonderfully; wonderfully in a double sense, for it was found that as
they grew older so they grew smaller and smaller. But as they shrank in
size, so they became less transparent and more round. At last this
topsy-turvy growth came to an end, and they started growing bigger
again, and lo! as the days sped on, these strange water-babies slowly
revealed themselves: they were young eels! More than this, they proved
to be nothing less than 'elvers'--long esteemed the daintiest of dishes
by those who prize delic