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EXTRACTS FROM AN ACCOUNT OF TOURS ALONG THE 



MALABAR COAST. 



By Edgar Thurston, c.m.z.s., 



Superintendent, Madras Government Museum. 



Soon after my arrival in India, in 1886, accompanied by my staff of taxider- 

 mists, who excel in fish-stuffing, I made a short tour on the western coast of 

 the Madras Presidency, from Cochin southwards by the system of backwaters — 

 the home of otters and crocodiles — to Trivandrum, the capital of the Maharaja 

 of Travancore. The object of this tour was the making of an initial collection 

 of the fishes of Malabar for the Madras museum, and the greater part of the 

 time was spent at Cochin, which affords abundant natural facilities for fish 

 capture. More recently, in 1894, a tour was made from Cochin northward to 

 Cannanore, with halts at Calicut and Tellicherry, with a view to making a 

 survey of the littoral fauna of the Madras coast of the Indian Ocean with the 

 assistance of the dredge. 



The work of the tours commenced on each occasion at Trichur, a large town 

 twenty miles from the station of Shoranur on the Madras Railway, from which 

 place Trichur is easily reached, by a well-avenued road, in bullock cart or 

 pony transit. Between Shoranur and Trichur is the village of Vadakancheri, 

 where the best Trichur mats are made. At Trichur fishing is actively carried 

 on with nets from boats in the fine open sheet of water, which extends for some 

 miles south of the town. The fish market contained an abundant supply of fish 

 caught locally, as well as fish sent from Cochin by backwater. 



At the time of my visit in 1886, the phenomenon of phosphorescence was 

 extremely brilliant on the first night spent on the backwater ; the fishes, as 

 they darted to and fro, being so brilliantly illuminated that I at first thought 

 that it must be caused by Micrococcus phlilgeri, a microscopic luminous organism 

 which grows in colonies on the skin of fishes. But, on collecting some of the 

 water in a tumbler, I discovered that the phosphorescence was really 

 produced by myriads of small Medusae, many of which contained tiny Crustacea 

 imbedded in their gelatinous substance. Phosphorescence in all its brilliancy 

 I have, in the course of many wanderings along the coast of Southern India, only 

 seen on one other occasion, viz., on the Pulicat Lake, north of Madras ; and, in 

 this instance, it was produced by hosts of copepods. 



The natives who live along the backwater between Trichur and Cochin, and 

 rely largely on the products thereof for physiological sustentation, are able to 

 obtain not only an abundance of a bivalve mollusc (Velorita cyprinoides), whose 

 shells are collected together and burned into chunam (lime), but also of fish, 

 which they capture with line or net, or, more simply, by wading in the shallow 

 water and picking the fish out of the muddy bottom with their hands. Fish 

 and shell fish, as captured, are cleaned from the adhering mud and placed in 

 chatties attached to a string held between the teeth, and floating on the surface 



