![]() ![]() Eels were unaccountable, and so, writes the Swedish journalist Patrik Svensson in “ The Book of Eels” (Ecco), an unusual and beguiling guide to an unusual and beguiling animal, it fell to us to try our best to account for them. That they sometimes seemed to issue from the earth itself. They couldn’t help but notice that the creatures seemed to have no ovaries, no testicles, no eggs, no milt. They also caught them, inexplicably, in ponds that dried out and refilled each year, and that had no access to other bodies of water. People caught eels in brooks, rivers, lakes, the sea. They were a simple and abundant food enjoyed by members of the poorer classes, like the Cockney woman described in “King Lear” who accidentally puts them in a pie still alive. In Sweden, they might be smoked, braised in beer, or fried in butter in Italy, boiled in tomato sauce in England, jellied in stock, or fried with eggs into an elver cake. ![]() What could be more ordinary than an eel? Not so long ago, European eels, Anguilla anguilla, were widely eaten. had now been settled.” All of them, that is, “except the eel question.” Just two years before Freud arrived in Trieste, the German biologist Max Schultze, lying on his deathbed, observed, perhaps wistfully, that he was leaving a world where “all the important questions . . . Questions that had befuddled mankind for centuries-where life comes from, what it is made of, how it changes, why it ends-were now seen as knowable, quantifiable, explicable. The nineteenth century had brought Darwin and Mendel, Pasteur and Mendeleev, and a growing sense that scientists (a word coined only in the eighteen-thirties), with their studies and their systems and their microscopes, were at last equal to solving the great quandaries of the natural world. To see them would be to begin to solve a profound mystery, one that had stumped Aristotle and countless successors throughout the history of natural science: Where do eels come from? But in Trieste, elbow-deep in slime, he hoped to be the first person to find what men of science had been seeking for thousands of years: the testicles of an eel. The young man, whose name was Sigmund Freud, eventually followed his evolving questions in other directions. “All I see when I close my eyes is the shimmering dead tissue, which haunts my dreams, and all I can think about are the big questions, the ones that go hand in hand with testicles and ovaries-the universal, pivotal questions.” “My hands are stained by the white and red blood of the sea creatures,” he wrote to a friend. He carried them home, to a dissection table in a corner of his room, and-from eight until noon, when he broke for lunch, and then again from one until six, when he quit for the day and went to ogle the women of Trieste on the street-he diligently slashed away, in search of gonads. Every morning, as the fishermen brought in their catch, he went to meet them at the port, where he bought eels by the dozens and then the hundreds. In the spring of 1876, a young man of nineteen arrived in the seaside city of Trieste and set about a curious task. ![]()
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