e 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 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.

This habit of lying in the mud and there becoming torpid may be looked
upon as a natural alternative to the habit of migrating across country,
when your pond dries up, in search of larger and more permanent sheets
of water. Some fish solve the problem how to get through the dry season
in one of these two alternative fashions and some in the other. In flat
countries where small ponds and tanks alone exist, the burying plan is
almost universal; in plains traversed by large rivers or containing
considerable scattered lakes, the migratory system finds greater favour
with the piscine population.

One tropical species which adopts the tactics of hiding itself in the
hard clay, the African mud-fish, is specially interesting to us human
beings on two accounts--first, because, unlike almost all other kinds of
fish, it possesses lungs as well as gills; and, secondly, because it
forms an intermediate link between the true fish and the frogs or
amphibians, and therefore stands in all probability in the direct line
of human descent, being the living representative of one among our own
remote and early ancestors. Scientific interest and filial piety ought
alike to secure our attention for the African mud-fish. It lives its
amphibious life among the rice-fields on the Nile, the Zambesi, and the
Gambia, and is so greatly given to a terrestrial existence that its
swim