Part 14

The most celebrated example of this faculty, however, is the climbing perch (Anabas scandens) of India. The vagaries of this little fish have been recorded from the earliest times, and numerous modern witnesses have borne record to its powers. Mr E. Layard once encountered several travelling along a hot dusty gravel-road in the mid-day sun. Daldorf, a Danish zoologist of reputation, asserts that he has seen this species in the act of climbing palm-trees, effecting its ascent by means of fins and tail, with the aid of its spinous gill-covers. There is, however, some doubt whether he was not under mistake in this, though the fact of its crawling up the banks and living out of water is abundantly known.

On the coasts of Ceylon, according to its accomplished historian,--on the rocks which are washed by the surf, there are multitudes of a curious little fish, (Salarias alticus,) which possesses the faculty of darting along the surface of the water, and running up the wet stones, with the utmost ease and rapidity. By aid of its pectoral and ventral fins and gill-cases, it moves across the damp sand, ascends the roots of the mangroves, and climbs up the smooth face of the rocks in search of flies; adhering so securely as not to be detached by repeated assaults of the waves. These little creatures are so nimble, that it is almost impossible to lay hold of them, as they scramble to the edge, and plunge into the sea on the slightest attempt to molest them. They are from three to four inches in length, and of a dark-brown colour, almost indistinguishable from the rocks they frequent.

In all these cases probably, the power of sustaining a protracted privation of water depends on a peculiar structure of the pharynx, which is divided by membranous plates into cells which the fish can fill at pleasure with water, and by ejecting small portions at a time can moisten its gills, and thus preserve the filaments of these organs in a fit condition to maintain the circulation and oxygenation of the blood. These labyrinthal water-chambers are particularly numerous and complicated in the Anabas just mentioned. This, however, has no analogy with the lung of the Lepidosiren.

Mag. Nat. Hist., ii. 322.

From the Times of Jan. 24, 1861.

The Oscillatoria is a genus of plants; it is a microscopic Alga of wire-like form belonging to the great Confervoid family, having the remarkable peculiarity of spontaneous and apparently voluntary motion.

Latrobe's Alpenstock, p. 12.

Seemann's Isthmus of Panama.

I am indebted for this note to the Rev. Leonard Jenyns. See his edition of White's Selborne, (1843) p. 66.

Zoologist, pp. 6541, 6564.

Ceylon, i. 211.

Journ. Asiat. Soc. Bengal, vi. 465.

Brit. Fishes, i. xxvii. Aristotle had long before given the same explanation.

De Pisc. in siceo degent.

De Piscibus.

Siam, i. 144.

Emb. to Siam, i. 10.

Fishes of Guiana, i. 113.

Annals N. H., May 1853.

Tennent's Ceylon, ii. 498.

III.

MERMAIDS.

According to Berosus there came up from the Red Sea, on the shore contiguous to Babylonia, a brute creature named Oannes, which had the body of a fish, above whose front parts rose the head of a man; it had two human feet, which projected from each side of the tail; it had also a human voice and human language. This strange monster sojourned among the rude people during the day, taking no food, but retiring to the sea again at night; and continued for some time, teaching them the arts of civilised life. Other ancient authors, as Polyhistor and Apollodorus, allude to the same tradition; and we gather that the portrait of the learned stranger (not painted from the life, we may presume, considering the condition of the people when he appeared, unless we may suppose it to have been the effort of one of his pupils in the pictorial art under his instruction) was preserved at Babylon to the historic period.

In an elaborate sculpture of the later Assyrian period, discovered by M. Botta at Khorsabad, a maritime expedition is portrayed, and the sea around the ships is filled with various marine animals, and among them the compound mythic forms of winged bulls and bull-lions, in which the Assyrians delighted, together with a figure composed of the body and tail of a fish extended horizontally, and the perpendicular trunk and foreparts of a man, crowned with the sacred cap, possibly representing the traditional Oannes.

The god Dagon of the Philistines, and the goddess Atergatis of the Syrians were worshipped under the same combination of the human and piscine forms, and the Tritons of classical mythology perpetuated the idea.

It is curious that in almost all ages and in almost all countries there should have prevailed a belief in the actual living existence of creatures like this. Was the mythological symbol the origin of the persuasion? Or is there any marine animal uniting so much of the general form of the fish with that of man as to have given the conception of the idol? A naturalist of deserved eminence has maintained, on purely scientific grounds, that such an animal must exist,--that the laws of nature absolutely require such a being; and though the amount of force which his reasoning, possesses will be estimated differently according as we reject or accept the hypothesis of the circularity of the great plan of nature, we may as well see what he has to say for a marine primate,--be he man or ape, mermaid or mermonkey.

"There is yet," says Mr Swainson, "another primary type necessary to complete the circle of the quadrumanous animals, and it is that which we have elsewhere distinguished as the natatorial; but of such an animal we have only vague and indefinite accounts. It will be seen that, throughout the whole class of quadrupeds, the aquatic types are remarkably few, and in general scarce; and that they contain fewer forms or examples than any other, and are often, in the smaller groups, entirely wanting. To account for this is altogether impossible; we can only call attention to the fact, as exemplified in the aquatic order of Cetacea, in that of the Feræ, in the Pachydermata, in the circle of the Glires, and in all the remaining natatorial types of the different circles of quadrupeds. We do not implicitly believe in the existence of mermaids as described and depicted by the old writers--with a comb in the one hand and a mirror in the other; but it is difficult to imagine that the numerous records of singular marine animals, unlike any of those well known, have their origin in fraud or gross ignorance. Many of these narratives are given by eye-witnesses of the facts they vouch for--men of honesty and probity, having no object to gain by deception, and whose accounts have been confirmed by other witnesses equally trustworthy. Can it be supposed that the unfathomable depths of ocean are without their peculiar inhabitants, whose habits and economy rarely, if ever, bring them to the surface of the watery element? As reasonably might a Swiss mountaineer disbelieve in the existence of an ostrich, because it cannot inhabit his Alpine precipices, as that we should doubt that the rocks and caverns of the ocean are without animals destined to live in such situations, and such only. The natatorial type of the Quadrumana, however, is most assuredly wanting. Whatever its precise construction may or might have been, it would represent and correspond to the seals in the circle of the Feræ, or rapacious quadrupeds; while a resemblance to the Simiadæ, or monkeys, must be considered an essential character of any marine animal which is to connect and complete the circular series of types in the Quadrumana."

Mr Swainson absolutely excludes Man from the zoological circle, on grounds which few naturalists are disposed to think sufficient; else we might suggest that man himself is the natatorial type of the Primates. Taking this author's own selection of the characters which mark the natatorial types of animals, for our guide, we find that the largest size, the smallest fore-limbs, the most obtuse muzzle, the most carnivorous appetite, and the most natatory habits (for I do not know that the Apes, or the Sapajous, or the Lemurs, or the Bats, ever take to the water voluntarily, whereas savage Man is always a great swimmer), belong to Man, and so, Swainsonio ipso judice, constitute him the true aquatic primate. But if so, we do not want a merman or mermonkey; nay, we should not know where to insert him in the zoological circle if we found him; he would be awkwardly de trop.