FISH OUT OF WATER. 335 



actly like the round tiles so common on the roofs of Italian cottages. 

 The fish walks, or rather shambles along ungracefully, by the shuftiing 

 movement of a pair of stiff spines placed close behind his head, aided 

 by the steering action of his tail, and a constant snake-like wriggling 

 motion of his entire body. Leg-spines of somewhat the same sort are 

 found in the common English gurnard, and, in this age of aquariums 

 and fisheries exhibitions, most adult persons above the age of twenty- 

 one years must have observed the gurnards themselves crawling along 

 suspiciously by their aid at the bottom of a tank at the Crystal Palace 

 or the polyonymous South Kensington building. But, while the Euro- 

 pean gurnard only uses his substitutes for legs on the bed of the ocean, 

 my itinerant tropical acquaintance (his name, I regret to say, is Cal- 

 lichthys) uses them boldly for terrestrial locomotion across the dry 

 lowlands of his native country. And, while the gurnard has no less 

 than six of these pro-legs, the American land-fish has only a single 

 pair with which to accomplish his arduous journeys. If this be con- 

 sidered as a point of inferiority in the armor-plated American species, 

 we must remember that while beetles and grasshoppers have as many 

 as six legs apiece, man, the head and crown of things, is content to 

 scramble through life ungracefully with no more than two. 



There are a great many tropical American pond-fish which share 

 these adventurous gypsy habits of the pretty little Callichthys. Though 

 they belong to two distinct groups, otherwise unconnected, the circum- 

 stances of the country they inhabit have induced in both families this 

 queer fashion of waddling out courageously on dry land, and going 

 on voyages of exploration in search of fresh ponds and shallows new, 

 somewhere in the neighborhood of their late residence. One kind in 

 particular, the Brazilian Doras, takes land-journeys of such surprising 

 length that he often spends several nights on the way, and the Indians 

 who meet the wandering bands during their migrations fill several 

 baskets full of the prey thus dropped upon them, as it were, from the 

 kindly clouds. 



Both Doras and Callichthys, too, are well provided with means of 

 defense against the enemies they may chance to meet during their 

 terrestrial excursions ; for in both kinds there are the same bony 

 shields along the sides, securing the little travelers, as far as possible, 

 from attack on the part of hungry piscivorous animals. Doras further 

 utilizes its powers of living out of water by going ashore to fetch dry 

 leaves, with which it builds itself a regular nest, like a bird's, at the 

 beginning of the rainy season. In this nest the affectionate parents 

 carefully cover up their eggs, the hope of the race, and watch over 

 them with the utmost attention. Many other fish build nests in the 

 water, of materials naturally found at the bottom ; but Doras, I be- 

 lieve, is the only one that builds them on the beach, of materials 

 sought for on the dry land. 



Such amphibious habits on the part of certain tropical fish are easy 



