ACANT1I0PTERYG1I. 361 



tenant in the service of the Danish East India Company, in 

 an Article in the Linnaean Transactions, 1797, affirms, that 

 he took one of those fishes with his own hands in November 

 1791, in the cleft of the bark of a palm-tree, of the species 

 borassus Jlabelliformis, which was growing near a pond. 

 The fish was five feet above the water, and was endeavouring 

 to ascend still higher. For this purpose it fastened itself to 

 the bark by the spines of its opercula, bent its tail, hooked 

 itself by the spines of its anal, then raised and fixed itself 

 afresh, to recommence the same movement. It is by similar 

 movements that this fish walks upon the ground. M. John 

 tells a similar story. This fish, he says, usually remains in 

 the muddy bottom of ponds and lakes. It creeps on dry 

 ground for several hours by the inflexion of its body; and by 

 the assistance of its serrated opercula, and the spines of its 

 fins climbs on the palm-trees which are in the neighbourhood 

 of the ponds, along which the water drops, which the rains 

 have accumulated at their tops. 



Nevertheless some observers, not less respectable, have 

 made no mention of the very extraordinary fact: M. Kein- 

 wardt, who has frequently taken the anabas at Java, never 

 heard that any thing similar was attributed to it ; M. Les- 

 chenault, who sent several of these fish from Pondicherry, 

 confines himself to observing that they inhabit rivers and 

 fresh water ponds; Mr. Hamilton Buchanan, in his history 

 of the fishes of the Ganges, goes farther, and perhaps too far; 

 he not only denies the fact, but regards it as contrary to the 

 whole order of nature, and supposes that the observation of 

 Daldorf, with whose testimony alone he was acquainted, was 

 owing to some accidental circumstance, with the cause of 

 which that naturalist was unacquainted. 



A point, however, upon which all observers agree, and 

 which is explained by the peculiar conformation of the pha- 

 ryngeals of this fish, is, that it is one of those which can live 



