DR. BENJAMIN ALLEN, OF BRAINTREE. 155
in ponds, where none breed. He adds that, two years pre-
viously, he bad taken two eels from a mill-pond, and had dissected
them, finding in one an egg and in the other six young,
apparently in the great intestine. He says also that he had
searched salt-water eels, but had found nothing similar in them,
though he believed they were of the same species. Allen's
diction is confused and, to a certain extent, contradictory, as
Dale soon pointed out.1 He did so, however, in a manner
entirely friendly to Allen, desiring merely, he explains, to
"excite that ingenious person to perfect his discoveries and, by
ocular demonstrations, to convince the curious of the truth and
certainty of his observations." Many years later, Allen acted on
Dale's advice, as we shall see hereafter.
To the foregoing, Allen appends, without separate heading,
an observation (relating to something which had been published
shortly before) on the Malarial Agues, then so common in
Essex :—
I have [he says] observed Agues—Tertian, I mean—to come when the moon has
come to an angle ; as, in one or two [cases], when the moon was setting ; and
the succeeding fits, when she culminated ; the third fit, at a rising moon ; and
so on.
In the following year (1699), Allen contributed two papers.
The first was "An Account of the Scarabaeus Galeatus
Pulsator or Death-Watch."' He says that, in August 1695,
he took two of the beetles, being guided to them by the noise
they made, and that he kept them above four days for observa-
tion. He describes the insect minutely, as well as its habit of
beating, but ridicules the common idea of its noise foretelling a
death ; and he illustrates his description by means of three
figures, one of them much enlarged, being "drawn with the help
of a microscope."
In a second paper, published at the same time, Allen gave
"An Account of the Gall-Bee."3 He had observed that some
Aleppo Galls which he had still contained a small bee "resem-
bling the small sort of our wild bees which [nest in the] earth,"
and he discusses the question how these bees obtained air
whilst still confined in the gall. He concludes that they were
"maintained by a subtiller air that pervades more minute
pores [than atmospheric air]."
1 Philos. Trans., xx., pp. 92-97 (1699).
2 Philos. Trans., xx . pp. 376-378 (1699).
3 Philos. Trans., xx., p. 375 (1699).