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The Indian snakehead is a closely allied species, common in the shallow ponds and fresh-water tanks of India, where holy Brahmans bathe and drink 9L0-827 Exam and die and are buried, and most of which dry up entirely during the dry season. The snakehead, therefore, has similarly accommodated himself to this annual peculiarity in his local habitation by acquiring a special chamber for retaining water to moisten his gills throughout his long deprivation of that prime necessary. He lives composedly in semi-fluid mud, or lies torpid in the hard baked clay at the bottom of the dry tank from which all the water has utterly evaporated in the drought of summer. As long as the mud remains soft enough to allow the fish to rise slowly through it, they come to the surface every now and then to take in a good hearty gulp of air, exactly as gold fish do in England when confined with thoughtless or ignorant cruelty in a glass globe too small to provide sufficient oxygen for their respiration. But when the mud hardens entirely they hibernate or rather aestivate, in a dormant condition, until the bursting of the monsoon fills the ponds once more with the welcome water. Even in the perfectly dry state, however, they probably manage to get a little air every now and again through the numerous chinks and fissures in the sun-baked mud. Our Aryan brother then goes a-fishing playfully with a spade and bucket, and digs the snakehead in this mean fashion out of his comfortable lair, with an ultimate view to the manufacture of pillau. In Burmah, indeed, while the mud is still soft, the ingenious Burmese catch the helpless creatures by a still meaner and more unsportsmanlike device. They spread a large cloth over the slimy ooze where the snakeheads lie buried, and so cut off entirely for the moment their supply of oxygen. The poor fish, half-asphyxiated by this unkind treatment, come up gasping to the surface under the cloth in search of fresh air, and are then easily caught with the hand and tossed into baskets by the degenerate Buddhists.

Old Anglo-Indians even say that some of these mud 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 successive seasons are suddenly filled by heavy rains, they are found to be swarming at once 9L0-827 Braindump with full-grown snakeheads 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 unfaithful ages.

Such amphibious habits on the part of certain tropical fish are easy enough to explain by the fashionable clue of ‘adaptation to environment.’ Ponds are always very likely to dry up, and so the animals that frequent ponds are usually capable of bearing a very long deprivation of water. Indeed, 9L0-624 Braindump our evolutionists generally hold that land animals have in every case sprung from pond animals which have gradually adapted themselves to do without water altogether. Life, according to this theory, began in the ocean, spread up the estuaries into the greater rivers, thence extended to the brooks and lakes, and finally migrated to the ponds, puddles, swamps and marshes, whence it took at last, by tentative degrees, to the solid shore, the plains, and the mountains. Certainly the tenacity of life shown by pond animals is very remarkable. Our own English carp bury themselves deeply in the mud in winter, and there remain in a dormant condition many months entirely without food. During this long hibernating period, they can be preserved alive for a considerable time out of water, especially if their gills are, from time to time, slightly moistened. They may then be sent to any address by parcels post, packed in wet moss, 9L0-827 without serious damage to their constitution; though, according to Dr. Guenther, these dissipated products of civilisation prefer to have a piece of bread steeped in brandy put into their mouths to sustain them beforehand. In Holland, where the carp are not so sophisticated, they are often kept the whole winter through, hung up in a net to keep them from freezing. At first they require to be slightly wetted from time to time, just to acclimatise them gradually to so dry an existence; but after a while they adapt themselves cheerfully to their altered circumstances, and feed on an occasional frugal meal of bread and milk with Christian resignation.

Of all land-frequenting fish, however, by far the most famous is the so-called climbing perch of India, which not only walks bodily out of the water, but even climbs trees by means of special spines, near the head and tail, so arranged as to stick into the bark and enable it to wriggle its way up awkwardly, something after the same fashion as the ‘looping’ of caterpillars. The tree-climber is a small scaly fish, seldom more than seven inches long; but it has developed a special breathing apparatus to enable it to keep up the stock of oxygen on its terrestrial excursions, which may be regarded as to some extent the exact converse of the means employed by divers to supply themselves with air under water. Just above the gills, which form of course its natural hereditary breathing apparatus, the climbing perch has invented a 9L0-827 Dump new and wholly original water chamber, containing within it a frilled bony organ, which enables it to extract oxygen from the stored-up water during the course of its aerial peregrinations. While on shore it picks up small insects, worms, and grubs; but it also has vegetarian tastes of its own, and does not despise fruits and berries. The Indian jugglers tame the climbing perches and carry them about with them as part of their stock in trade; their ability to live for a long time out of water makes them useful confederates in many small tricks which seem very wonderful to people accustomed to believe that fish die almost at once when taken out of their native element.

There are a great many tropical American pond-fish which share these adventurous gipsy habits of the pretty little Callichthys. Though they belong to two distinct 9L0-624 groups, otherwise unconnected, the circumstances of the country they inhabit have induced in both families this queer fashion of waddling out courageously on dry land, and going on voyages of exploration in search of fresh ponds and shallows new, somewhere in the neighbourhood of their late residence. One kind in 9L0-624 Dump particular, the Brazilian Doras, takes land journeys of such surprising length, that he often spends several nights on the way, and the Indians who meet the wandering bands during their migrations fill several baskets full of the prey thus dropped upon them, as it were, from the kindly clouds.

Both Doras and Callichthys, too, are well provided with means of defence against the enemies they may chance to meet during their terrestrial excursions; for in both kinds there are the same bony shields along the sides, securing the little travellers, as far as possible, from attack on the part of hungry piscivorous
9L0-624 Exam animals. Doras further utilises its powers of living out of water by going ashore to fetch dry leaves, with which it builds itself a regular nest, like a bird’s, at the beginning of the rainy season. In this nest the affectionate parents carefully cover up their eggs, the hope of the race, and watch over them with the utmost attention. Many other fish build nests in the water, of materials naturally found at the bottom; but Doras, I believe, is the only one that builds them on the beach, of materials sought for on the dry land.

I took one up in my hand and examined it more carefully; though the catching it wasn’t by any means so easy as it sounds on paper, for these 9L0-623 Dump perambulatory fish are thoroughly inured to the dangers and difficulties of dry land, and can get out of your way when you try to capture them with a rapidity and dexterity which are truly surprising. The little creatures are very pretty, well-formed catfish, with bright, intelligent eyes, and a body armed all over, like the armadillo’s, with a continuous coat of hard and horny mail. This coat is not formed of scales, as in most fish, but of toughened skin, as in 9L0-623 Exam crocodiles and alligators, arranged in two overlapping rows of imbricated shields, exactly like the round tiles so common on the roofs of Italian cottages. The fish walks, or rather shambles along ungracefully, by the shuffling movement of a pair of stiff spines placed close behind his head, aided by the steering action of his tail, and a constant snake-like wriggling motion of his entire body. Leg spines of somewhat the same sort are found in the common English gurnard, and in this age of Aquariums and Fisheries Exhibitions, most adult persons above the age of twenty-one years must have observed the gurnards themselves crawling along suspiciously by their aid at the bottom of a tank at the Crystal Palace or the polyonymous South Kensington building. But while the European gurnard only uses his substitutes for legs on the bed of the ocean, my itinerant tropical acquaintance (his name, I regret to say, is Callichthys) uses them boldly for terrestrial locomotion across the dry lowlands of his native country. And while the gurnard has no less than six of these pro-legs, the American land fish 9L0-623 Braindump has only a single pair with which to accomplish his arduous journeys. If this be considered as a point of inferiority in the armour-plated American species, we must remember that while beetles and grasshoppers have as many as six legs apiece, man, the head and crown of things, is content to scramble through life ungracefully with no more than two.

Strolling one day in what is euphemistically termed, in equatorial latitudes, ‘the cool of the evening,’ along a tangled tropical American field-path, through 9L0-062 Exam a low region of lagoons and watercourses, my attention happened to be momentarily attracted from the monotonous pursuit of the nimble mosquito by a small animal scuttling along irregularly before me, as if in a great hurry to get out of my way before I could turn him into an excellent specimen. At first sight I took the little hopper, in the grey dusk, for one of the common, small green lizards, and wasn’t much disposed to pay it any distinguished share either of personal or scientific attention. But as I walked on a little further through the dense underbrush, more and more of these shuffling and scurrying little creatures kept crossing the path, hastily, all in one direction, and all, as it were, in9L0-062
a formed body or marching phalanx. Looking closer, to my great surprise, I found they were actually fish out of water, going on a walking tour, for change of air, to a new residence–genuine fish, a couple of inches long each, not eel-shaped or serpentine in outline, but closely resembling a red mullet in miniature, 9L0-623 though much more beautifully and delicately coloured, and with fins and tails of the most orthodox spiny and prickly description. They were travelling across country in a bee-line, thousands of them together, not at all like the helpless fish out of water of popular imagination, but as unconcernedly and naturally as if they had been accustomed to the overland route for their whole lifetimes, and were walking now on the king’s highway without let or hindrance.

The sturgeon is another more or less migratory fish, originally (like the salmon) of freshwater habits, but now partially marine, which ascends its parent stream 9L0-008 Braindump for spawning during the summer season. Incredible quantities are caught for caviare in the great Russian rivers. At one point on the Volga, a hundred thousand people collect in spring for the fishery, and work by relays, day and night continuously, as long as the sturgeons are going up stream. On some of the tributaries, when fishing is intermitted for a single day, the sturgeons have been known to completely fill a river 360 feet wide, so that the backs of the uppermost fish were pushed out of the water. (I take this statement, not from the ‘Arabian Nights,’ as the scoffer might imagine, 9L0-062 but from that most respectable authority, Professor Seeley.) Still, in spite of the enormous quantity killed, there is no danger of any falling off in the supply for the future, for every fish lays from two to three million eggs, each of which, as caviare eaters well know, is quite big enough to be distinctly seen with the naked eye in the finished product. The best caviare is simply bottled exactly as found, with the addition merely of a little salt. No man of taste can pretend to like the nasty sun-dried sort, in which the individual eggs are reduced to a kind of black pulp, and pressed hard with the feet into doubtful barrels.

In conclusion, let me add one word of warning as to certain popular errors about the young fry of sundry well-known species. Nothing is more common than to hear it asserted that sprats are only immature herring. This is a complete mistake. Believe it not. Sprats are a very distinct species of the herring genus, and they never grow much bigger than when they appear, _broches_, at table. The largest adult sprat measures only six inches, while full-grown herring may attain as much as fifteen. Moreover, herring have teeth on the palate, always wanting in sprats, by which means the species may be readily distinguished at all ages. When in doubt, therefore, do not play trumps, but examine the palate. On the other hand, whitebait, long supposed to be a distinct species, has now been proved by Dr. Guenther, the greatest of ichthyologists, to consist chiefly of the fry or young of herring. To complete our discomfiture, the same eminent authority has also shown that the pilchard and the sardine, which we thought so unlike, are one and the same fish, called by different names according as he is caught off the Cornish coast or in Breton, Portuguese, or Mediterranean waters. Such aliases are by no means uncommon among his class. To say the plain truth, fish are the most variable and ill-defined of animals; they differ so much in different habitats, so many hybrids occur between them, and varieties merge so readily by imperceptible stages into one 9L0-062 Dump another, that only an expert can decide in doubtful cases–and every expert carefully reverses the last man’s opinion. Let us at least be thankful that whitebait by any other name would eat as nice; that science has not a single whisper to breathe against their connection with lemon; and that whether they are really the young of _Clupea harengus_ or not, the supply at Billingsgate shows no symptom of falling short of the demand.

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