The Book of Eels, Patrik Svensson [bill gates best books .TXT] 📗

the world. I pictured mile after mile of open sea that suddenly turned into a blanket of seaweed teeming with life and movement and eels writhing around one another and dying and sinking to the ocean floor while tiny see-through willow leaves floated up toward the light and let the invisible current take them. Every time we caught an eel, I looked into its eyes, trying to catch a glimpse of what it had seen. None of them ever met my gaze.

5Sigmund Freud and the Eels of Trieste

How much can you ever really know about an eel? Or about a person? It turns out the two questions are related.

Sigmund Freud was nineteen when, in 1876, he picked up the gauntlet thrown by Aristotle more than two thousand years previously, which had been picked up in vain by others so many times before. He was the person destined to find the holy grail of natural science: the testicles of the eel.

Freud was born in 1856 in Freiberg in Moravia (now Příbor in the Czech Republic), but his family moved to Vienna before his fourth birthday. Even as a child, he was an excellent student, with an interest in literature and a remarkable talent for language; he enrolled at a university in Vienna when he was seventeen. Freud was primarily a medical student, but he also studied philosophy, physiology, and zoology under the renowned professor Carl Claus.

Claus specialized in marine zoology, was a fervent Darwinist and a leading expert in crustaceans, and like everyone in his field, he had an interest in eels. He had conducted research on hermaphroditic animals, of which the eel was still popularly believed to be one, and in addition to his professorship at the University of Vienna, he was also the head of a marine research station in Trieste.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, the eel question had lain dormant. Since Carlo Mondini had found and provided a plausible description of the reproductive organs of the female eel, it seemed it would simply be a matter of time before the male organs were found and identified also. And once they had been so located, the intractable mystery of the eels’ procreation would be solved.

That being said, a lot of people were unconvinced by Mondini’s discovery. One skeptic was the Italian scientist Lazzaro Spallanzani, who would eventually go down in history as the person who successfully dismissed spontaneous generation. Spallanzani traveled to Comacchio himself to investigate Mondini’s findings and dismissed them as improbable. It was, of course, also a matter of prestige. So many prominent researchers had tried for so long to explain and describe the organs responsible for and the method of the eel’s reproduction. Why had no one else succeeded? One single eel with reproductive organs and roe after all those years? Why couldn’t any more be found? No, Mondini’s eel seemed unique. It seemed implausible. And besides, sometimes, objective probability is less important than what people want to believe. In the scientific world, a lot of people simply didn’t want to believe in Carlo Mondini’s eel.

In Germany, the search for the eel’s reproductive organs became, for a while, a popular spectacle. A reward of fifty marks was offered to any person who could find an eel carrying roe. Newspapers all over the country wrote about it. The eels were to be sent to a certain professor Rudolf Virchow, who would conduct a careful examination of each one; the German fishing authorities had agreed to pay the postage. The fanfare and the generous award resulted in a large number of eels being packaged and posted. Hundreds of eels from every part of Germany—half-eaten eels, rotting eels, eels crawling with parasites. The packages flowed in at such a rate that the fishing authority almost went bankrupt. And still, no sexually mature eel with roe was found.

It was only in 1824 that Martin Rathke, a German professor of anatomy, was able to find and adequately describe a female eel with fully developed reproductive organs, independent of Carlo Mondini. In 1850, Rathke also found an eel with fully developed eggs inside. It turned out Mondini had probably been right all along; his description of the reproductive organs tallied with Rathke’s, but the eggs in Mondini’s eel had been much smaller, as they were less fully developed.

With the first half of the biological equation verified, the hunt for the second part, the mythical testicles, could begin in earnest. But it was slow going at the outset. Many researchers still chose to believe that eels were hermaphroditic. The fatty tissue found adjacent to the reproductive organs in the mature females was in fact probably the male organs. How else could the answer to the mystery have eluded science for so long?

Laypeople by and large also preferred to cling to older, slightly more fanciful theories. In 1862, an amateur researcher, David Cairncross, published a book entitled The Origin of the Silver Eel, in which he revived an old belief held by Sicilian fishermen that the eel’s first manifestation was in fact a beetle, and that its past as an insect was proved by its ability to get by equally well on dry land and in water.

Almost one hundred years after Carlo Mondini’s discovery, in 1874, a Polish zoologist, Szymon Syrski, announced that he and his colleagues at the natural historical museum in Trieste at last had found something that might be a mature male eel. Inside it, he had located a small, lobe-shaped organ that differed from the descriptions provided by Mondini and Rathke. It might, in fact, be the long-sought eel testicle. But since Syrski was unable to sufficiently describe the organ and prove it really did produce semen, nothing was certain. The scientific community required additional observations.

Thus in March 1876, Carl Claus decided to dispatch one of his young students from the University of Vienna to his research station in Trieste. And that is how at the age of nineteen, Sigmund Freud suddenly found himself in