Chap. IV.] FISHES PALLIXG FROM THE CLOUDS. 227 



collecting water from the roofs of buildings, or heard of them on 

 the decks or awnings of vessels in the harbour, where they must 

 have appeared had they descended from the sky. One of the 

 most remarkable phenomena of this kind occurred during a tre- 

 mendous deluge of rain at Kattywar, on the 25th of July, 1850, 

 when the ground aroimd Rajkote was found literally covered 

 with fish ; some of them were found on the tops of haystacks, where 

 probably they had been drifted by the storm. In the course of 

 twenty-four successive hours twenty-seven inches of rain fell, 

 thirty-five fell in twenty-six hours, seven inches within one hour 

 and a half, being the heaviest fall on record. At Poonah, on the 

 3rd of August, 1852, after a very heavy fall of rain, multitudes 

 of fish were caught on the ground in the cantonments, full half a 

 mile from the nearest stream. If showers of fish are to be ex- 

 plained on the assumption that they are carried up by squalls or 

 violent winds, from rivers or spaces of water not far away from 

 where they fall, it would be nothing wonderful were they seen to 

 descend from the air during the furious squalls which occasion- 

 ally occur in June." 



NOTE (B.) 



MIGRATION OF FISHES OVER LAND. 



Opinions of the Greeks and Romans. 



It is an illustration of the eagerness with which, after the 

 expedition of Alexander the Grreat, particulars connected with 

 the natural history of India were sought for and arranged by the 

 Greeks, that in the works both of Aristotle and Theophrastus 

 the facts are recorded of the fishes in the Indian rivers migrating 

 in search of water, of their burying themselves in the mud on its 

 failure, of their being dug out thence alive during the dry sea- 

 sou, and of their spontaneous reappearance on the return of the 

 rains. The earliest notice is in the treatise of Aristotle De 

 Respiratione, chap, ix., who mentions the strange discovery of 

 living fish found beneath the surface of the soil, twv l^dvcop oi 

 iToXkoi ^coaiv sv rrj yj], aKivrjrlfyvTSS fisvToi, Kat, supiaKovrai 

 opvTTo^svoL ; and in his History of Animals he conjectures 

 that in pqnds periodically dried the ova of the fish so buried 



a 2 



