Labyrinthici and Holconoti 367 



culum is serrated. The color is reddish olive, with a blackish 

 spot at the base of the caudal fin; the head, below the level 

 of the eye, grayish, but relieved by an olive band running from 

 the angle of the mouth to the angle of the pre-operculum, and 

 with a black spot on the membrane behind the hindermost 

 spines of the operculum. 



"The climbing-fish was first made known in a memoir, 

 printed in 1797, by Daldorf, a lieutenant in the service of the 

 Danish East India Company at Tranquebar. Daldorf called 

 it Perca scandens, and affirmed that he himself had taken one 

 of these fishes, clinging by the spine of its operculum in a slit 

 in the bark of a palm (Borassus flabelliformis) which grew near 

 a pond. He also described its mode of progression; and his 

 observations were substantially repeated by the Rev. Mr. John, 

 a missionary resident in the same country. His positive evi- 

 dence was, however, called into question by those who doubted 

 on account of hypothetical considerations. Even in popular 

 works not generally prone to even a judicious skepticism, 

 the accounts were stigmatized as unworthy of belief. We 

 have, however, in answer to such doubts, too specific informa- 

 tion to longer distrust the reliability of the previous reports. 



"Mr. Rungasawmy Moodeliar, a native assistant of Capt. 

 Jesse Mitchell of the Madras Government Central Museum, 

 communicated to his superior the statement that 'this fish 

 inhabits tanks or pools of water, and is called Panai fer-i, i.e., 

 the fish that climbs palmyra-trees. When there are palmyra- 

 trees growing by the side of a tank or pool, when heavy rain 

 falls and the water runs profusely down their trunks, this fish, 

 by means of its opercula, which move unlike those of other 

 fishes, crawls up the tree sideways (i.e., inclining to the sides 

 considerably from the vertical) to a height of from five to seven 

 feet, and then drops down. Should this fish be thrown upon 

 the ground, it runs or proceeds rapidly along in the same manner 

 (sideways) as long as the mucus on it remains.' 



"These movements are effected by the opercula, which, it 

 will be remembered, are unusually mobile in this species ; they 

 can, according to Captain Mitchell (and I have verified the 

 statement), be raised or turned outwards to nearly a right 

 angle with the body, and when in that position, the suboper- 



