308 FISH OUT OF WATER 



haunting Oriental fish will survive for many years in a 

 state of suspended animation, and that when ponds or 

 jhils which are known to have been dry for several suc- 

 cessive seasons are suddenly filled by heavy rains, they 

 are found to be swarming at once with full-grown snake- 

 heads released in a moment from what I may venture to 

 call their living tomb in the hardened bottom. Whether 

 such statements are absolutely true or not the present 

 deponent would be loth to decide dogmatically ; but, if we 

 were implicitly to swallow everything that the old Anglo- 

 Indian in his simplicity assures us he has seen well, the 

 clergy would have no further cause any longer to deplore 

 the growing scepticism and unbelief of these latter un- 

 faithful ages. 



This habit of lying in the mud and there becoming 

 torpid may be looked upon as a natural alternative to the 

 habit of migrating across country, when your pond dries 

 up, in search of larger and more permanent sheets of 

 water. Some fish solve the problem how to get through 

 the dry season in one of these two alternative fashions and 

 some in the other. In flat countries where small ponds 

 and tanks alone exist, the burying plan is almost uni- 

 versal ; in plains traversed by large rivers or containing 

 considerable scattered lakes, the migratory system finds 

 greater favour with the piscine population. 



One tropical species which adopts the tactics of hiding 

 itself in the hard clay, the African mud-fish, is specially 

 interesting to us human beings on two accounts first, 

 because, unlike almost all other kinds of fish, it possesses 

 lungs as well as gills ; and, secondly, because it forms an 

 intermediate link between the true fish and the frogs or 

 amphibians, and therefore stands in all probability in the 

 direct line of human descent, being the living representa- 

 tive of one among our own remote and early ancestors. 



