Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and: Topographical with Notices of Its Natural History, Antiquities and; Productions, Volume 1Tennent, James Emerson, Sir
History
Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and: Topographical with Notices of Its Natural History, Antiquities and; Productions, Volume 1
Tennent, James Emerson, Sir
Natural history -- Sri Lanka; Sri Lanka
descend from the sky. They are not, so far as I know, found in the
higher parts of the island. I have never seen them, though I have
watched carefully, in casks collecting water from the roofs of
buildings, or heard of them on the decks or awnings of vessels in the
harbour, where they must have appeared had they descended from the sky.
One of the most remarkable phenomena of this kind occurred during a
tremendous deluge of rain at Kattywar, on the 25th of July, 1850, when
the ground around Rajkote was found literally covered with fish; some of
them were found on the tops of haystacks, where probably they had been
drifted by the storm. In the course of twenty-four successive hours
twenty-seven inches of rain fell, thirty-five fell in twenty-six hours,
seven inches within one hour and a half, being the heaviest fall on
record. At Poonah, on the 3rd of August, 1852, after a very heavy fall
of rain, multitudes of fish were caught on the ground in the
cantonments, full half a mile from the nearest stream. If showers of
fish are to be explained on the assumption that they are carried up by
squalls or violent winds, from rivers or spaces of water not far away
from where they fall, it would be nothing wonderful were they seen to
descend from the air during the furious squalls which occasionally occur
in June."
* * * * *
NOTE (B.)
MIGRATION OF FISHES OVER LAND.
_Opinions of the Greeks and Romans_.
It is an illustration of the eagerness with which, after the expedition
of Alexander the Great, particulars connected with the natural history
of India were sought for and arranged by the Greeks, that in the works
both of ARISTOTLE and THEOPHRASTUS the facts are recorded of the fishes
in the Indian rivers migrating in search of water, of their burying
themselves in the mud on its failure, of their being dug out thence
alive during the dry season, and of their spontaneous reappearance on
the return of the rains. The earliest notice is in the treatise of
ARISTOTLE _De Respiratione_, chap. ix., who mentions the strange
discovery of living fish found beneath the surface of the soil, [Greek:
tôn ichthuôn oi polloi zôsin en tê gê, akinêtizontes mentoi, kai
euriskontai oruttomenoi]; and in his History of Animals he conjectures
that in ponds periodically dried the ova of the fish so buried become
vivified at the change of the season.[1] HERODOTUS had previously
hazarded a similar theory to account for the sudden appearance of fry in
the Egyptian marshes on the rising of the Nile; but the cases are not
parallel. THEOPHRASTUS, the friend and pupil of Aristotle, gave
importance to the subject by devoting to it his essay [Greek: Peri tês
tôn ichthyôn en zêrô diamonês], _De Piscibus in sicco degentibus_. In
this, after adverting to the fish called _exocoetus_, from its habit of
going on shore to sleep, [Greek: apo tês koitês], he instances the small
fish ([Greek: ichthydia]), which leave the rivers of India to wander
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