Spontaneous Generation.

Observer, Volume XI, Issue 648, 30 May 1891, Page 10

Spontaneous Generation.

Mr Marsh's mind is no common one ; for a common mind busies itself with common objects, whilst, on the contrary, he brings under argument the secrets to be resolved by poking into the recesses of Nature. But, on the eel subject, he does not appear to have yet become cognisable of all that pertains to the theory respecting its distribution and modes of existence. The eel is a kind of wator-snake. Serpents have teeth, like pike; so has this fomhr-gorm, as the ancient Norsemen might call it ; snakes have rudimentary feefc, and no doubt it has. The slimy, slippery customer is amphibious, and, providing nights be cool and the grass damp, can make considerable journeys overland ; indeed, he can find water-hole reservoirs by instinct. When the surface water dries, he can bore deeply into the mud, and live in the damp subsoil of a dam excavation, until BUch time as fresh rain tails, or he is dug up to delude new-chums into the belief he has developed from a protoplasmic mud egg. He can bore up a household waterpipe and cause a blockage, to the annoyance of the good-wife and the joy of the licensed plumber. If there is a water hole, other water— well, spring, or what not — must be in the vicinage ; and where from gravitation, ponderosity, accumulation or the like, water is forced through tiny passages of a porous nature — since it must go some road or other, and that the easiest, though it be winding— an eel can bore along the same route. Thereupon, presto 1 eels have dropped from the olawa of an eagle, and by good luck just when the king of wtngqd fowl was vertically opposite a water-hole 1 Eels are often seen alive upon fishmongers' shop-boards, and,, when cut in pieces for cooking, have still retained contortionary muscular motion, so that their wriggling power is enormous in comparison to size and looks. It is au eel of a lightish-blue green that buries itself in the dam-clay about Gatton and Buaraba, on the Darling Downs. How did -specimens get there? Why, they made their way out of the creeks in the bush —the same that bullocks find by instinct, and so shockingly muddy . by mad trampling— whenever they scent rairtcoming on \ they found the plase by peregrinatory instinct, > Man is so implicated in theories, that, Jike the Irishman's pig, he seems to be scudding in twenty directions at once, mentally • on the contrary, animal instinct is unerringand direct. What nearest approaches it is the feeling of woman. She, as a rule, keeps theories well ovei> board, judges by feeling and instinct' combined, and does so far more naturally than man.^Apropos of the subject of eels, it may be added -: that there is good and ample reason why they should. '.glide athwart tha wet grass fields or sedgy marshes during tlie dark hours. They like worms, and slugs, and things;; Vand these, in the weird moonlight, provide them with \a: rich, sub-. stantial, and inexhaustible banquet, B{ ; if» i te9t - tp'. I ;e^8 <i aß;t 1 p ; :" men, is practically applicable r h6.Vv.cpooinpn«spnß8 < V dictum, proceeding from the optfmisticilij^ancl 'heart '■' of true genius and wisdoms-Seek and y e^r^h a. [ l -fi ,n d . ;> ;'V

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