34 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



hunting and unsuccessfully hunted, until the approach of the dry sea- 

 son. Then as the stream dried up, it had taken to the last pool, and 

 when this in turn had dried, the fish, like its neighboring friends and 

 relatives, had burrowed deep into the thickening mud, rolled itself up 

 into a ball, secreted a mass of mucus about its coiled body, and made 

 ready for a summer 'sleep.' One of its first precautions was to keep 

 its nose uppermost and to see that its ' breath ' found a passageway 

 out of its slimy capsule into the open burrow : in this way, then, it could 

 breathe throughout the summer, while awaiting dormantly the return 

 of rains, and the melting of its 'cocoon.' In this stage in its history 

 it came to be dug up, and, together with other cocoons and their sur- 

 rounding clods of earth, was crated and shipped to Europe. I am 

 told that the shippers take pains to surround the crate with iron gauze 

 to preserve the fish from the attacks of rats on shipboard, and that the 

 clods of earth are disposed in such a way that the sides containing the 

 breathing apertures face outward so that the imprisoned fish run the 

 least possible danger of becoming stifled. 



The present shipment came into the hands of Professor H. 0. 

 Forbes, Director of the Public Museums of Liverpool, and through his 

 kindness the present specimen was donated to Columbia. A photo- 

 graph, Pig. 1, shows the cocoon just as it came to the present writer. 

 The tubular burrow through which the fish worked its way into the 

 mud is seen conspicuously, and one may note that it was somewhat 

 crooked, in spite of the fact that part of its margin has been broken 

 away in the present specimen. Its usual length appears to depend 

 upon the character of the bottom ; from two to five inches are the meas- 

 urements stated. At the end of the burrow lies the cocoon, a roundish 

 mass, brown in color, paper-like in texture, but greatly roughened 

 on its outer surface by attachment to rootlets and foreign matter. Its 

 inner surface, as one would expect from the mucous nature of the 

 shell, is found to be smooth and delicate. Where the cocoon meets the 

 outer burrow its shell is somewhat flattened, and here, near the side, 

 it is perforated by a delicate straw-like tube, formed of dry mucus, 

 which passes downward into the mouth of the fish, and through this the 

 fish respires during the dry season. It has, indeed, been shown by Pro- 

 fessor W. N. Parker that this tube passes within the mouth of the fish 

 and conducts the air to the entrance of the fish's lung. 



In liberating the fish from the cocoon, the usual procedure is to 

 allow the mass to remain in warmish water until the earth softens and 

 melts, but in the present case a sliorter, but somewhat more perilous, 

 course was adopted. One side of the block was cautiously sliced away 

 until the side of the papery cocoon became visible: then the earthy 

 margins of the opening were carefully removed, so that the process 

 of liberating the fish could be observed. The entire mass was next 



