Page:Natural History, Fishes.djvu/166

152 in the previous season; though it is difficult to imagine that perfect fishes can sustain life for several weeks or months without water. The common Hindoos stoutly maintain that they are precipitated from the clouds with the falling rains.

These fishes have, in general, the abdominal cavity very short, the tail commencing near the head, and being much lengthened; the fins are sometimes singularly developed. The genus Ophiocephalus has the body cylindrical and lengthened, with a head much like that of a snake.

We find in this small genus an extraordinary development of the fins; the caudal is excessively

large, deeply lunate or forked, larger in fact than in any other known fish. The dorsal and anal have the final soft rays gradually lengthened and terminating in filaments; the ventrals have