[2781] “Acescente humore.” Hardouin has suggested that the proper reading may be “arescente humore”—“from moisture dried up;” for, he remarks, Aristotle, in his Hist. Anim. B. v. c. 18, states, that the “empides,” gnats formed from the ascarides in the slime of wells, are more frequently produced in the autumn season.
[2782] The apuæ, or aphyæ, Cuvier says, are nothing else but the fry of fish of a large kind.
[2783] Cuvier says, that some of the shell-fish deposit their eggs upon stakes and piles, which are driven down into the water among sea-weed, and the bottoms of old ships: but that many of them perish from the solutions formed by those bodies in a state of rottenness, or, at all events, are not produced from their decomposition.
[2784] “Ostreariis.” This was unknown to Aristotle, who, in his work De Gener. Anim. B. iii. c. 11, expressly denies that the oyster secretes any generative or fecundating liquid.
[2785] Cuvier says, that at the time of the oyster spawning, its body appears swollen in some parts with a milky fluid, which is not improbably the fecundating fluid. During this season the oyster is generally looked upon as unfit for food; among us, from the beginning of May to the end of July.
[2786] This, Cuvier remarks, is a mere vague hypothesis, as to the reproduction of the eel, without the slightest foundation. Pliny borrows it from Aristotle, Hist. Anim. B. vi. c. 9.
[2787] The squatina and the ray do not interbreed, Cuvier observes, any more than other fish; and the Squatina raia, or rhinobatis, (which was said to be their joint production), is a particular species, more flat in form than the squalus, and longer than the ray.
[2788] Ῥινόβατος, “the squatinoraia.”
[2789] “Lupus.” The Perca labrax of Linnæus; see c. [28] of the present Book.