A Real Feeling about Eels
What mystery puzzled both Aristotle and Freud? What did the German biologist, Max Schultze, mean on his deathbed by the last unsettled question; "the eel question?"
What mystery puzzled both Aristotle and Freud? What did the German biologist, Max Schultze, mean on his deathbed by the last unsettled question; "the eel question?"[1].
Aristotle believed in "spontaneous generation"[2], or the fabrication of animals from inanimate matter. How else would you explain maggots appearing in flesh, or fleas appearing in dust? One of his more appeeling arguments was that eels lacked sexual organs and therefore had no way of mating.
Despite the theory of spontaneous generation having been discredited by Louis Pasteur[3] by 1862[4], Freud was still in search of the testicles of an eel when he arrived in Trieste in 1876 during his early biological studies[5]. He dissected hundreds of eels in his search. Even decades later, famously, his thoughts were still with the male reproductive system[6][7]
The question on all these scientist's minds was the question that we still cannot fully answer. The reel question is, where do they come from? Keep tuned for the answer.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/25/where-do-eels-come-from. ↩︎
Of pasteurisation fame. ↩︎
Freud, Sigmund (1877). Beobachtungen über Gestaltung und feineren Bau der als Hoden beschriebenen Lappenorgane des Aals [Observations on the configuration and finer structure of the lobed organs in eels described as testes]. Sitzungsberichte der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Classe (in German). Vol. 75, p. 419]. ↩︎
See of course, penis envy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penis_envy. ↩︎
And the oedipus complex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus_complex. ↩︎
