FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION
Sta,—I enjoyed immensely Mr. Neil Bell's article on the life history of the common eel in your issue of February 16th. Although it is an almost incredible story, I am prepared to swallow it all with the voracity of the anguilla anguilla himself, with the exception of the last paragraph, in which Mr. Bell describes the journey of the multitude of elvers, hatched beyond the Bermudas, across two thousand miles of the Atlantic Ocean to the rivers from which their parents came . . .
". . . but there was nothing haphazard about their choice of a hunting-ground where they must remain till sexual maturity ; with the blind infallible prescience of instinct they chose the places where their parents had lived before them: females taking the trail of that mother dead ere they were born ; males their father's."
How does Mr. Bell, how can Mr. Bell, or anyone else for that matter, conceivably know?—Yours faithfully,
Previous page
