three inches in which there was then a quantity of small fish.  The water had no connection with any pond or stream whatsoever.”  Mr. CRIPPS, in like manner, in speaking of Galle, says:  “I have seen in the vicinity of the fort, fish taken from rain-water that had accumulated in the hollow parts of land that in the hot season are perfectly dry and parched.  The place is accessible to no running stream or tank; and either the fish, or the spawn from which they were produced, must of necessity have fallen with the rain.”

Mr. J. PRINSEP, the eminent secretary to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, found a fish in the pluviometer at Calcutta, in 1838.—­Journ.  Asiat.  Soc.  Bengal, vol. vi p. 465.

A series of instances in which fishes have been found on the continent of India under circumstances which lead to the conclusion that they must have fallen from the clouds, have been collected by Dr. BUIST of Bombay, and will be found in the appendix to this chapter.]

The surmise of the buried spawn is one sanctioned by the very highest authority.  Mr. YARRELL in his “History of British Fishes,” adverting to the fact that ponds which had been previously converted into hardened mud, are replenished with small fish in a very few days after the commencement of each rainy season, offers this solution of the problem as probably the true one:  “The impregnated ova of the fish of one rainy season, are left unhatched in the mud through the dry season, and from their low state of organisation as ova, the vitality is preserved till the recurrence, and contact of the rain and oxygen in the next wet season, when vivification takes place from their joint influence."[1]

[Footnote 1:  YARRELL, History of British Fishes, introd. vol. i. p. xxvi.]

This hypothesis, however, appears to have been offered upon imperfect data; for although some fish like the salmon scrape grooves in the sand and place their spawn in inequalities and fissures; yet as a general rule spawn is deposited not beneath but on the surface of the ground or sand over which the water flows, the adhesive nature of each egg supplying the means of attachment.  But in the Ceylon tanks not only is the surface of the soil dried to dust after the evaporation of the water, but the earth itself, twelve or eighteen inches deep, is converted into sun-burnt clay, in which, although the eggs of mollusca, in their calcareous covering, are in some instances preserved, it would appear to be as impossible for the ova of fish to be kept from decomposition as for the fish themselves to sustain life.  Besides, moisture in such situations is only to be found at a depth to which spawn could not be conveyed by the parent fish, by any means with which we are yet acquainted.

But supposing it possible to carry the spawn sufficiently deep, and to deposit it safely in the mud below, which is still damp, whence it could be liberated on the return of the rains, a considerable interval would still be necessary after the replenishing of the ponds with water to admit of vivification and growth.  But so far from this interval being allowed to elapse, the rains have no sooner ceased than the fishing of the natives commences, and those captured in wicker cages are mature and full grown instead of being “small fish” or fry, as affirmed by Mr. Yarrell.