easure right outside the sockets, so as to look in whatever
direction he chooses, without even taking the trouble to turn his head
to left or right, backward or forward. At ebb tide this singular
peripatetic goby literally walks straight out of the water, and
promenades the bare beach erect on two legs, in search of small crabs
and other stray marine animals left behind by the receding waters. If
you try to catch him, he hops away briskly much like a frog, and stares
back at you grimly over his left shoulder, with his squinting optics.
So completely adapted is he for this amphibious long-shore existence,
that his big eyes, unlike those of most other fish, are formed for
seeing in the air as well as in the water. Nothing can be more ludicrous
than to watch him suddenly thrusting these very movable orbs right out
of their sockets like a pair of telescopes, and twisting them round in
all directions so as to see in front, behind, on top, and below, in one
delightful circular sweep.

There is also a certain curious tropical American carp which, though it
hardly deserves to be considered in the strictest sense as a fish out of
water, yet manages to fall nearly half-way under that peculiar category,
for it always swims with its head partly above the surface and partly
below. But the funniest thing in this queer arrangement is the fact that
one half of each eye is out in the air and the other half is beneath in
the water. Accordingly, the eye is divided horizontally by a dark strip
into two distinct and unlike portions, the upper one of which has a
pupil adapted to vision in the air alone, while the lower is adapted to
seeing in the water only. The fish, in fact, always swims with its eye
half out of the water, and it can see as well on dry land as in its
native ocean. Its name is Anableps, but in all probability it does not
wish the fact to be generally known.

The flying fish are fish out of water in a somewhat different and more
transitory sense. Their aerial excursions are brief and rapid; they can
only fly a very little way, and have soon to take once more for safety
to their own more natural and permanent element. More than forty kinds
of the family are known, in appearance very much like English herrings,
but with the front fins expanded and modified into veritable wings. It
is fashionable nowadays among naturalists to assert that the flying fish
don't fly; that they merely jump horizontally out of the water with a
powe