154 DR. BENJAMIN ALLEN, OF BRAINTREE.
the place.1 It was on this visit, doubtless, that Allen obtained
the information which enabled him to state2 that
the harbour or channel there is artificial and of no old date, the current having
been formerly on the other side of Languard Fort, which then stood in Essex.
The two were still friendly more than twenty years later, when
both were old men ; for, in Allen's Common-place Book, we find
(pp. 194 and 275-276) some "Observations relating to Ancient
Monuments, chiefly collected from Mr. Dale's Relation of his
Journey to the Bath, in [May] 1731 ; wch I wrote from his
mouth, Jan. 1731-2." It appears that Dale, leaving London
by way of "Pickadilly" and Knightsbridge, went via Marl-
borough (where he saw the "greyweathers") and Avebury
(where he saw the stone circles) to Bath. Among places he
visited in the vicinity of that City were Stanton-Drew, Wells,
Wookey Hole (which he describes), and Glastonbury. On the
return, he passed through Yeovil, Ilchester, Cranborne, Win-
chester, Salisbury (whence he saw Old Sarum and Stonehenge),
Staines, Egham, "and so home," as Allen says, quite in the
style of Pepys.
That Allen at least knew Dr. Derham, of Upminster, Ray's
friend and biographer, appears from his Common-place Book, in
which he mentions (p. 216) something which "Mr. Derham
told me."
It was, apparently, just before the close of the century that
Allen (now about thirty-five years of age) began to come into
notice as a naturalist, through contributing several papers to the
publications of the Royal Society. As he was never a Fellow
of the Society, he must have owed his introduction to someone
who was ; and it is easy to surmise that his introducer was
either his old master Dr. Gale or his neighbour Ray.
Allen's first paper, published in 1698,3 was "On the Manner
of Generation of Eels "—a subject which had been disputed,
as he says, since the days of Aristotle.4 Allen asserted that the
two sexes were separate (a fact which had been disputed); also
that their breeding had been unobserved previously because
they bred in February—a time when very few were taken, except
1 Hist. of Harwich and Dovercourt (1730).
2 Chalybeat and Purging Waters, p. 107 (1699).
3 Philos. Trans., xix., pp. 664-666 (1698).
4 It was, of course, only during the last few years that the mystery surrounding the
breeding of eels was solved by the discovery that they breed in very deep sea-water (see
Essex Nat., ix , p. 261: 1896).