Labyrinthici and Holconoti 581 
culum is serrated. The color is reddish olive, with a blackish 
spot at the base of the caudal fin; the head, below the level 
of the eye, grayish, but relieved by an olive band running from 
the angle of the mouth to the angle of the pre-operculum, and 
with a black spot on the membrane behind the hindermost 
spines of the operculum. 
“The climbing-fish was first made known in a memoir, 
printed in 1797, by Daldorf, a lieutenant in the service of the 
Danish East India Company at Tranquebar. Daldorf called 
it Perca scandens, and affirmed that he himself had taken one 
of these fishes, clinging by the spine of its operculum in a slit 
in the bark of a palm (Borassus flabelliformis) which grew near 
a pond. He also described its mode of progression; and his 
observations were substantially repeated by the Rev. Mr. John, 
a missionary resident in the same country. His positive evi- 
dence was, however, called into question by those who doubted 
on account of hypothetical considerations. Even in popular 
works not generally prone to even a judicious skepticism, 
the accounts were stigmatized as unworthy of belief. We 
have, however, in answer to such doubts, too specific informa- 
tion to longer distrust the reliability of the previous reports. 
“Mr. Rungasawmy Moodeliar, a native assistant of Capt. 
Jesse Mitchell of the Madras Government Central Museum, 
communicated to his superior the statement that ‘this fish 
inhabits tanks or pools of water, and is called Panat fert, i.e, 
the fish that climbs palmyra-trees. When there are palmyra- 
trees growing by the side of a tank or pool, when heavy rain 
falls and the water runs profusely down their trunks, this fish, 
by means of its opercula, which move unlike those of other 
fishes, crawls up the tree sideways (i.e., inclining to the sides 
considerably from the vertical) to a height of from five to seven 
feet, and then drops down. Should this fish be thrown upon 
the ground, it runs or proceeds rapidly along in the same manner 
(sideways) as long as the mucus on it remains.’ 
“These movements are effected by the opercula, which, it 
will be remembered, are unusually mobile in this species; they 
can, according to Captain Mitchell (and I have verified the 
statement), be raised or turned outwards to nearly a right 
angle with the body, and when in that position, the suboper- 
