y
land, but did, the traveller said, climb trees. There was a climax! No
one characterized this story fitly, for all perceived that the Arabian
must know its nature very well. And so the Arabian traveller died in
good time, and the thousand years went on about their business, and in
our days the fish story has been verified. Now it rests, partly, on the
authority of "two Dutch naturalists residing at Tranquebar." Two Dutch
naturalists are a good foundation for anything less than a pyramid. In
this matter they are not alone, however; for the naturalist Daldorf,
also, who was a lieutenant in the Danish East-India Company's service,
communicated to Joseph Banks, who "did not believe in the mermaid," that
"in the year 1791 he had taken this fish from a moist cavity in the stem
of a Palmyra palm which grew near a lake." More than this, "he saw it
when already five feet above the ground struggling to ascend still
higher." And this was its process: "suspending itself by its
gill-covers, and bending its tail to the left, it fixed its anal fin in
the cavity of the bark, and sought by expanding its body to urge its way
upward"; and its progress was arrested only by the hand with which the
valiant Daldorf seized it. More in reference to the same fish may be
found in Tennent's great book on Ceylon, in Hartwig, and later
naturalists generally.

Men would naturally doubt of fish in trees. Even the Chinese would. "To
climb a tree in pursuit of fish," is a phrase actually used as an
hyperbole of nonsense by many Tsze, in the book called "Shang Mung." And
the above is therefore a fair instance of the progress of human
intelligence,--of a thousand years of incredulity, and final scientific
admission. Let it be taken here as absinthe, appetizingly.

The ancients believed, among other things, that man had, to say the
least, relations in the various departments of Nature and in the various
divisions of animal life; that there were wild men who lived in the
forests, and differed from man proper principally in other than
physical respects; and that there were wild men who lived in the sea:
also that there were beings half-man and half-horse; others half-man and
half-bird; and others, again, half-man and half-fish. In respect to the
wild man of the woods, it may be said that those words are the literal
signification of the Malayan words _orang outang_; and that animal's
appearance seems to determine that the Satyr and kindred creatures were