Cuar. X.] BURYING FISH. 355 
But the faculty of becoming torpid at such periods is 
not confined in Ceylon to the crocodile sand fishes ; — 
it is also possessed by some of the fresh-water mol- 
lusca and aquatic coleoptera. One of the former, the 
Ampullaria glauca, is found in still water in all parts 
of the island, not alone in the tanks, but in rice-fields 
and the watercourses by which they are irrigated. 
When, during the dry season, the water is about to 
evaporate, it burrows and conceals itself! till the re- 
turning rains restore it to activity, and reproduce its 
accustomed food. There, at a considerable depth in the 
soft mud, it deposits a bundle of eggs with a white 
calcareous shell, to the number of one hundred or more 
in each group. The Melania Paludina in the same 
way retires during the droughts into the muddy soil of 
the rice lands; and it can only be by such an instinct 
that this and other mollusca are preserved when the tanks 
evaporate, to re-appear in full growth and vigour imme- 
diately on the return of the rains.” 
1A knowledge of this fact was 
turned to prompt account by Mr. 
Edgar S. Layard, when holding 
a judicial office at Point Pedro in 
1849. A native who had been de- 
frauded of his land complained 
before him of his neighbour, who, 
during his absence, had removed 
their common landmark, divert- 
ing the original watercourse and 
obliterating its traces by filling it 
up toa level with the rest of the 
field. Mr. Layard directed a 
trench to be sunk at the contested 
spot, and discovering numbers of 
the Ampullaria, the remains of the 
eggs, and the living animal which 
had been buried for months, the 
evidence was so resistless as to 
confound the wrong-doer, and ter- 
minate the suit, 
2 For a similar fact relative to 
the shells and water beetles in the 
pools near Rio Janeiro, see Dar- 
win’s Nat, Journal, ch. y. p. 99. 
Benson, in the first vol. of Glean- 
ings of Science, published at Cal- 
cutta in 1829, describes a species 
of Paludina found in pools, which 
are periodically dried up in the 
hot season but reappear with the 
rains, p. 368. And in the Journal 
of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 
for Sept. 1832, Lieut Hurroy, in 
a singularly interesting paper, has 
followed up the same subject by a 
narrative of his own observations 
at Mirzapore, wherein June, 1832, 
after a few heavy showers of rain, 
that formed pools on the surface 
of the ground near a mango grove, 
he saw the Paluding issuing from 
AA 2 
