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

to pull away. Given the inordinate amount of time so many people have spent studying and trying to understand the eel, we should, simply put, know more than we do. That we don’t is something of a mystery. Zoologists call it “the eel question.”

Aristotle may have been one of the first to document his misapprehensions about the eel, but he was, as we know, not the last. The eel has continued to elude scientific study into our modern era. Any number of prominent researchers, as well as amateurs with varying degrees of enthusiasm, have studied the eel without ever really understanding it. Some of the most noted names in the history of natural science have tried in vain to find the answer to the eel question. It’s as though their senses were not enough in themselves. Somewhere in the darkness and mud, the eel has managed to hide away from human knowledge. When it comes to eels, an otherwise knowledgeable humanity has always been forced to rely on faith to some extent.

In the olden days, a distinction was likely often made between eels and other fish. The eel was a creature apart, with its appearance and behavior, its invisible scales and barely visible gills and ability to survive out of water. It was different enough to make many people believe it was in fact an aquatic snake or amphibian. Homer himself seemed to distinguish eels from fish. After Achilles kills Asteropaios in the Iliad he “let him lie where he was on the sand, with the dark water flowing over him and the eels and fishes busy nibbling and gnawing the fat that was about his kidneys.” Today, the question is still asked from time to time: Is the eel really a fish?

This uncertainty about the fundamental nature of the eel has often led to some distance between us and them. People have found eels frightening or disgusting. They’re slimy and slithery, look like snakes and are said to eat human bodies; they move surreptitiously, in the dark and the mud. The eel is alien, unlike other animals, and regardless of how ubiquitous it has been, in our lakes and rivers and on our tables, it has always remained a stranger in some respects.

The most abiding and debated mystery about the eel has been its method of reproduction. It’s only in the past century that we’ve been able to give a reasonable, if not conclusive explanation. For a long time, many people simply chose to believe Aristotle and his theory about worms springing into being spontaneously from mud. Others sided with the natural philosopher Pliny the Elder, who perished in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, and who claimed that the eel reproduced by rubbing itself against rocks, which freed particles from its body that in turn became new eels. Some believed the Greek author Athenaeuss, who in the third century explained that the eel secreted a kind of fluid that sank into the mud and became new life.

More or less fanciful theories have been proposed throughout history. The ancient Egyptians were convinced eels sprang to life from nothing when the sun warmed the waters of the Nile. In various parts of Europe, it was thought that eels were born from decomposing vegetation on the seafloor or grew out of the rotting cadavers of other, dead eels. Some believed eels were born of sea-foam or created when the rays of the sun fell on a certain kind of dew that covered lakeshores and riverbanks in the spring. In the English countryside, where eel fishing was popular, most people adhered to the theory that eels were born when hairs from horses’ tails fell into water.

Many of the different theories about the birth of the eel clearly revolve around a common notion. That is to say, the notion that life can spring from something seemingly lifeless, a minute echo of the birth of the universe itself. A mosquito born of a speck of dust, a fly born out of a piece of meat, an eel born of mud—such an idea has been commonly referred to as spontaneous generation and has historically been a widespread idea, particularly before the invention of the microscope. Simply put, people believed what they could see, so if you were looking at a piece of rotting meat and suddenly saw maggots crawl out of it, without having observed any flies or fly eggs, how could you conclude anything but that the larvae had been created out of thin air? In the same way, no human has observed procreating eels, and as far as anyone could tell, they had no reproductive organs.

The idea of spontaneous generation leads back, of course, to the creation of everything, to the creation of life itself. If there was in fact once a beginning, when life sprung into existence from nothing (whether you attribute it to divine intervention or some other factor), it may not have been so outlandish to assume that such spontaneous generation could be repeated.

How it supposedly happened has been explained several ways. In Genesis, there is mention of a “wind from God” sweeping across the barren, desolate earth, creating not only light and land and plants but all the animals, too. The ancient philosophers known as the Stoics spoke of pneuma, the breath of life, a combination of air and heat needed for the existence of both living bodies and the soul. The underlying premise is a belief that nonliving matter can be turned into living matter, that the living and the dead are in fact dependent on one another and that some kind of life can exist in something seemingly dead. When the eel could not be understood or explained, that kind of thinking was clearly close at hand; the eel became a reflection of the deeper mystery of life’s origins.

What makes eels special, however, is that we’re still forced to rely on faith to some extent as we try to understand them. We may think we