After which outburst I pass to Herodotus.[876]
“Gregarious fish are not found in any numbers in the rivers; they frequent the lagunes, whence, at the season of breeding, they proceed in shoals towards the sea. The males lead the way, and drop their milt as they go, while the females, following close behind, eagerly swallow it down. From this they conceive, and when, after passing some time in the sea, they begin to be in spawn, the whole shoal sets off on its return to its ancient haunts. Now, however, it is no longer the males, but the females, which take the lead: they swim in front in a body, and do exactly as the males did before, dropping little by little their grains of spawn as they go, while the males in their rear devour the grains, each one of which is a fish. A portion of the spawn escapes and is not swallowed by the males, and hence come the fishes which grow afterwards to maturity....
“When the Nile begins to rise, the hollows in the land and the marshy spots near the river are flooded before any other places by the percolation of the water through the river-banks; and these, almost as soon as they become pools, are found to be full of numbers of little fishes. I think that I understand how it is this comes to pass. On the subsidence of the Nile the year before, though the fish retired with the retreating waters, they had first deposited their spawn in the mud upon the banks: and so, when at the usual season the water returns, small fry are rapidly engendered out of the spawn of the preceding year. So much concerning the fish.”
And was the great zoologist Aristotle[877] more accurate in his suggestion as to spawning? “Some surmise that the female becomes impregnated by swallowing the seminal fluid of the male. And there can be no doubt that this proceeding on the part of the female is often witnessed, for at the breeding season the female follows the males and perform the act and strike the males with their mouths under the belly, and the males are thereby induced to part with the sperm sooner and more plentifully.”
The Pahlavi texts tell us that at spawning time or season of excitement fish in pairs travel to and fro a mile in running water. In this coming and going they rub their bodies together, and a kind of sweat drops out between, and both become pregnant.
CHAPTER XXVIII
FISHING WITH THE HAIR OF THE DEAD
This chapter owes its birth to a passage of intrinsic interest but gruesome nature.
Before quoting or dealing with it, I may be allowed a few words as to my running it to ground and the curiosity it excited among Angling scholars.