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One of the white-haired, black-skinned children of men though the point is locally disputed looked up from the grass where he squatted gathering ripe fruit under a sapodilla tree; and to an inquiry: "Yaas-suh, yaas-suh; Mistuh Cahdhoss in de pomelo g'ove, suh, feedin' mud-cat to de wile-puss." "Doing what?" "Feedin' mud-fish to de wile-cat, de wile lynx-cat, suh."
The Mud-fish of South America, and also other forms in Australia and other places, have a modification of fins which are practically "limbs," which they actually use for traveling on land from pond to pond.
To provide against this annual contingency, the mud-fish retires into the soft clay at the bottom of the pools, where it forms itself a sort of nest, and there hibernates, or rather æstivates, for months together, in a torpid condition.
Though covered with scales, and most fish-like in outline, it presents points of anatomical resemblance both to salamanders and lizards; and, as a connecting bond between the North American mud-fish on the one hand and the wonderful lepidosiren on the other, it forms a true member of the long series by which the higher animals generally trace their descent from a remote race of marine ancestors.
It has even been suggested that there may possibly be a historic or ancestral reason for this weakness to attack, and one dating clear back to the days of the mud-fish. It is pointed out that the lung is the last of our great organs to develop, inasmuch as over half of our family tree is under water. This, of course, was several years ago. But the lung has not quite caught up yet.
Then there are "slimy things that crawl with legs upon a slimy sea," and any quantity of hopping mud-fish, and crabs, and a certain mollusc, and in the water various kinds of cat-fish.
In that case the amoeba I look at may have crawled among the slime of the Silurian seas when the common ancestor of myself and the royal family was an unassuming mud-fish like those in the reptile house in the Zoo. His memoirs would be interesting. The thought gives a solemn tint to one's meditations.
One tropical species which adopts the tactics of hiding itself in the hard clay, the African mud-fish, is specially interesting to us human beings on two accounts first, because, unlike almost all other kinds of fish, it possesses lungs as well as gills; and, secondly, because it forms an intermediate link between the true fish and the frogs or amphibians, and therefore stands in all probability in the direct line of human descent, being the living representative of one among our own remote and early ancestors.
Then the dragon assailed him with his halberd. But Notscha said: "Tell me who you are before we fight." "I am the son of the Dragon-King," was the reply. "And I am Notscha, the son of General Li Dsing. You must not rouse my anger with your violence, or I will skin you, together with that old mud-fish, your father!" Then the dragon grew wild with rage, and came storming along furiously.
The Ceratodus of certain Queensland rivers has one lung; though, I was told by the experts in Queensland, it is not a "mud-fish," and never lives in dry mud. However, the Protopterus of Africa and the Lepidosiren of South America have two lungs, as well as gills, and can live either in water or, in the dry season, on land.
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