There is considerable obscurity about the story of this ascent, although corroborated by M. John. Its motive for climbing is not apparent, since water being close at hand it could not have gone for sake of the moisture contained in the fissures of the palm; nor could it be in search of food, as it lives not on fruit but on aquatic insects.1 The descent, too, is a question of difficulty. The position of its fins, and the spines on its gillcovers, might assist its journey upwards, but the same apparatus would prove anything but a facility in steadying its journey down. The probability is, as suggested by Buchanan, that the ascent which was witnessed by Daldorf was accidental and ought not to be regarded as the habit of the animal. In Ceylon I heard of no instance of the perch ascending trees2, but the fact is well established that both it, the pullata (a species of polyacanthus) and others, are capable of long journeys on the level ground.3

the Travels of Two Mahomedans, states that Suleyman, one of his informants, who visited India at the close of the ninth century, was told there of a fish which, issuing from the waters, ascended the coco-nut palms to drink their sap, and returned to the sea. "On parle d'un poisson de mer que sortant de l'eau, monte sur la cocotier et boit le suc de la plante; ensuite il retourne à la mer." See REINAUD, Relations des Voyages faits par les Arabes et Persans dans le neuvième siècle, tom.

i.

p.

21., tom. ii. p. 93.

1 Kirby says that it is "in pursuit of certain crustaceans that form its food (Bridgewater Treatise, vol. i. p. 144);" but I am not aware of any crustaceans in the island which ascend the palmyra or feed upon its fruit. Birgus latro, which inhabits Mauritius and is said to climb the coco-nut for this purpose, has not been observed in Ceylon.

2 This assertion must be qualified by a fact stated by Mr. E. A. Layard, who mentions that on visiting one of

the fishing stations on a Singhalese river, where the fish are caught in staked enclosures, as described at p. 212, and observing that the chambers were covered with netting, he asked the reason, and was told "that some of the fish climbed up the sticks and got over.' Mag. Nat. Hist. for May, 1853, p. 390-1.

3 Strange accidents have more than once occurred in Ceylon arising from the habit of the native anglers; who, having neither baskets nor pockets in which to place what they catch, will seize a fish in their teeth whilst putting fresh bait on their hook. In August, 1853, a man was carried into the Pettah hospital at Colombo, having a climbing perch, which he thus attempted to hold, firmly imbedded in his throat. The spines of its dorsal fin prevented its descent, whilst those of the gillcovers equally forbade its return. It was eventually extracted by the forceps through an incision in the esophagus, and the patient recovered. Other similar cases have proved fatal.

Burying Fishes.-But a still more remarkable power possessed by some of the Ceylon fishes, is that of secreting themselves in the earth in the dry season, at the bottom of the exhausted ponds, and there awaiting the renewal of the water at the change of the monsoon.

The instinct of the crocodile to resort to the same expedient has been already referred to1, and in like manner the fish, when distressed by the evaporation of the tanks, seek relief by immersing first their heads, and by degrees their whole bodies, in the mud; and sinking to a depth at which they find sufficient moisture to preserve life in a state of lethargy long after the bed of the tank has been consolidated by the intense heat of the sun. It is possible, too, that the cracks which reticulate the surface may admit air to some extent to sustain their faint respiration.

The same thing takes place in other tropical regions, subject to vicissitudes of drought and moisture. The Protopterus2 which inhabits the Gambia (and which, though demonstrated by Professor Owen to possess all the essential organisation of fishes, is nevertheless provided with true lungs), is accustomed in the dry season, when the river retires into its channel, to bury itself to the depth of twelve or sixteen inches in the indurated mud of the banks, and to remain in a state of torpor till the rising of the stream after the rains enables it to resume its active habits. At this period the natives of the Gambia, like those of Ceylon, resort to the river, and secure the fish in considerable numbers as they flounder in the still shallow water. A parallel instance occurs in Abyssinia in relation to the fish of the Mareb, one of the sources of the Nile, the waters of which are partially absorbed in traversing the plains of Taka. During the summer its bed is dry, and in the slime at the depth of more than six feet is found a species

1 See antè, P. II. ch. iii. p. 189.

2 Lepidosiren annectans, Owen. See Linn. Trans. 1839.

of fish without scales, different from any known to inhabit the Nile.1

In South America the "round-headed hassar" of Guiana, Callicthys littoralis, and the "yarrow," a species of the family Esocidæ, although they possess no specially modified respiratory organs, are accustomed to bury themselves in the mud on the subsidence of water in the pools during the dry season.2 The Loricaria of Surinam, another Siluridan, exhibits a similar instinct, and resorts to the same expedient. Sir R. Schomburgk, in his account of the fishes of Guiana, confirms this account of the Callicthys, and says they can exist in muddy lakes without any water whatever, and great numbers of them are sometimes dug up from such situations."

In those portions of Ceylon where the country is flat, and small tanks are extremely numerous, the natives in the hot season are accustomed to dig in the mud for fish. Mr. Whiting, the chief civil officer of the eastern

1 This statement will be found in QUATREMERE'S Memoires sur l'Egypte, tom. i. p. 17, on the authority of Abdullah ben Ahmed ben Solaim Assouany, in his History of Nubia, "Simon, héritier présomptif du royaume d'Alouah, m'a assuré que l'on trouve, dans la vase qui couvre le fond de cette rivière, un grand poisson sans écailles, qui ne resemble en rien aux poissons du Nil, et que, pour l'avoir, il faut creuser à une toise et plus de profondeur." To this passage there is appended this note: "Le patriarche Mendes, cité par Legrand (Relation Hist. d'Abyssinie, du P. LOво, p. 212-3) rapporte que le fleuve Mareb, après avoir arrosé une étendue de pays considérable, se perd sous terre; et que quand les Portugais faisaient la guerre dans ce pays, its fouilloient dans le sable, et y trouvoient de la bonne eau et du bon poisson. Au rapport de l'auteur de l'Ayin Akbery (tom. ii. p. 146, ed. 1800), dans le Soubah de Caschmir, près du lieu nommé Tilah

66

moulah, est une grande pièce de terre qui est inondée pendant la saison des pluies. Lorsque les eaux se sont évaporées, et que la vase est presque sèche, les habitans prennent des bâtons d'environ une aune de long, qu'ils enfoncent dans la vase, et ils y trouvent quantité de grands et petits poissons." In the library of the British Museum there is an unique MS. of MANOEL DE ALMEIDA, written in the sixteenth century, from which Balthasar Tellez compiled his Historia General de Ethiopia alta, printed at Coimbra in 1660, and in it the above statement of Mendes is corroborated hy Almeida, who says that he was told by João Gabriel, a Creole Portuguese, born in Abyssinia, who had visited the Merab, and who said that the "fish were to be found everywhere eight or ten palms down, and that he had eaten of them."

2 See Paper "on some Species of Fishes and Reptiles in Demerara," by J. HANDCOCK, Esq., M.D., Zoological Journal, vol. iv. p. 243.

province, informs me that, on two occasions, he was present accidentally when the villagers were so engaged, once at the tank of Malliativoe, within a few miles of Kottiar, near the bay of Trincomalie, and again at a tank between Ellendetorre and Arnetivo, on the bank of the Virgel river. The clay was firm, but moist, and as the men flung out lumps of it with a spade, it fell to pieces, disclosing fish from nine to twelve inches long, which were full grown and healthy, and jumped on the bank when exposed to the sun light.

Being desirous of obtaining a specimen of the fish so exhumed, I received from the Moodliar of Matura, A. B. Wickremeratne, a fish taken along with others of the same kind from a tank in which the water had dried up; it was found at a depth of a foot and a half where the mud was still moist, whilst the surface was dry and hard. The fish which the moodliar sent to me proved to be an Anabas, and closely resembles the Perca scandens of Daldorf.

But the faculty of becoming torpid at such periods is not confined in Ceylon to the crocodiles and fishes, it is equally possessed by some of the fresh-water mollusca and aquatic coleoptera. The largest 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. There it deposits a bundle of eggs with a white calcareous shell, to the number of one hundred and more

in each group, at a considerable depth in the soft mud, under which, when the water is about to evaporate during the dry season, it burrows and conceals itself1 till the returning rains restore it to liberty, and reproduce its accustomed food. The Melania Paludina in the same way retires during the droughts into the muddy soil of the rice lands1; 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 immediately on the return of the rains.2

Dr. John Hunter has ventured the opinion that hybernation, although a result of cold, is not its immediate consequence, but is attributable to that deprivation of food and other essentials which extreme cold occasions, and against the recurrence of which nature makes a timely provision by a suspension of her functions. Ex

A knowledge of this fact was turned to prompt account by Mr. Edgar L. Layard, when holding a judicial office at Point Pedro in 1849. A native who had been defrauded of his land complained before him of his neighbour, who, during his absence, had removed their common landmark by diverting the original watercourse and obliterated its traces by filling it to a 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 wrongdoer, and terminate the suit.

2 For a similar fact relative to the shells and water-beetles in the pools near Rio Janeiro, see DARWIN'S Nat. Journal, ch. v. p. 99. BENSON, in the first vol. of Gleanings of Science, published at Calcutta 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. 363. And in the Journal of the Asiatic Soc. of Bengal for Sept. 1832, Lieut. HUTTON, in a singularly interesting paper, has followed up the

same subject by a narrative of his own observation at Mirzapore, where, in June, 1832, after a few heavy showers of rain which formed pools on the surface of the ground near a mango grove, he saw the Paludina issuing from the ground, "pushing aside the moistened earth and coming forth from their retreats; but on the disappearance of the water not one of them was to be seen above ground. Wishing to ascertain what had become of them, he turned up the earth at the base of several trees, and invariably found the shells buried from an inch to two inches below the surface." Lieut. Hutton adds that the Ampullaria and Planorbes, as well as the Paludinæ, are found in similar situations during the heats of the dry season. The British Pisidea exhibit the same faculty (see a monograph in the Camb. Phil. Trans. vol. iv.). The fact is elsewhere alluded to in the present work of the power possessed by the land leech of Ceylon of retaining vitality even after being parched to hardness during the heat of the rainless season, Vol. I. ch. vii. p. 312.

3 HUNTER'S Observations on parts of the Animal Economy, p. 88.