“As the moisture further evaporates the surface fish are left uncovered, and they crawl away in search of fresh pools.  In one place I saw hundreds diverging in every direction, from the tank they had just abandoned to a distance of fifty or sixty yards, and still travelling onwards.  In going this distance, however, they must have used muscular exertion sufficient to have taken them half a mile on level ground, for at these places all the cattle and wild animals of the neighbourhood had latterly come to drink; so that the surface was everywhere indented with footmarks in addition to the cracks in the surrounding baked mud, into which the fish tumbled in their progress.  In those holes which were deep and the sides perpendicular they remained to die, and were carried off by kites and crows.”

“My impression is that this migration takes place at night or before sunrise, for it was only early in the morning that I have seen them progressing, and I found that those I brought away with me in chatties appeared quiet by day, but a large proportion managed to get out of the chatties at night—­some escaped altogether, others were trodden on and killed.”

“One peculiarity is the large size of the vertebral column, quite disproportioned to the bulk of the fish.  I particularly noticed that all in the act of migrating had their gills expanded.”]

Referring to the Anabas scandens, Mr. Hamilton Buchanan says, that of all the fish with which he was acquainted it is the most tenacious of life; and he has known boatmen on the Ganges to keep them for five or six days in an earthen pot without water, and daily to use what they wanted, finding them as lively and fresh as when caught.[1] Two Danish naturalists residing at Tranquebar, have contributed their authority to the fact of this fish ascending trees on the coast of Coromandel, an exploit from which it acquired its epithet of Perca scandens.  Daldorf, who was a lieutenant in the Danish East India Company’s service, communicated to Sir Joseph Banks, 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.  He saw it when already five feet above the ground struggling to ascend still higher;—­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 upwards, and its march was only arrested by the hand with which he seized it.[2]

[Footnote 1:  Fishes of the Ganges, 4to. 1822.]

[Footnote 2:  Transactions Linn.  Soc. vol. iii. p. 63.  It is remarkable, however, that this discovery of Daldorf, which excited so great an interest in 1791, had been anticipated by an Arabian voyager a thousand years before.  Abou-zeyd, the compiler of the remarkable MS. known since Renandot’s translation by the title of the Travels of Two Mahometans, states that Suleyman, one of his informants,