The daily morning Alaskan., 1900-06-19
FISHES WITH LUNGS.
QUEER CREATURES THAT LIVE ON
 LAND OR IN WATER.

One Specimen That Lives Buried Un-
 der the River Bed During the Dry
 serson-Indfa's Climbing Perch and
 sfam's Inland Traveller.
 Every one knows that most fishes breathe in a different manner from that of the greater number of animals and that they get the oxygen necessary for their life from the water and not directly from the atmosphere. Water dissolves certain amount of oxygen, and the gills of fishes take this out of the water as our lungs take 1t from the mixed air we breathe. The gills are bundles of fine blood vessels, GOV cred by a delicate membrane that per mits oxygen to pass through 1t to the blood so long as 1t is moist, but usual ly when fish Is taken out of water the gills dry, and suffocation follows.
 The gills are very thin and may be torn or injured by slight violence. Mud, sand. sawdust or any of the many sim liar impurities in water may lacerate or irritate them, so nature has put f1l- ters, like combs, just in front of them to strain such foreign matters out of the water before reaching the real gills. These filters are called "gill rakers" and act as do the gratings put over gutters to hold back trash that might block them up, but the gutters grat- ings get clogged sometimes, and so do the gill rakers. When this happens, the fish must die, and 1t Is well known that the sawdust in our streams has been chief factor in the destruction of our fresh water fishes.
 But all fishes are not dependent on their glls. Some of them, like our common carp and goldfish, come to the surface now and then to take in drafts of air, and cells can travel over land around dams or other obstruc- tions. These efforts are trivial com pared with those of some fishes found In other parts of the world.
 These are the lung fishes, or dipnoi, as naturalists call them, and the &C., counts of them seem to border on the marvellous. In one group of these ani- mals the "swimbladder' Is a kind of luhB lhStChu VI II inClC hOdt, ub it ID III most fishes, and in some strange fishes in India there Is hollow space In the skull that acts as a lung, the walls of it having clusters of blood vessels about 1t, just as the vesicles of our lungs have. These fishes can bury themselves deep In the mud when the dry season comes on and live through 1t till the rains fill the rivers again.
 A fish in the Gambia river makes a cocoon of mucus and mud, in which 1t has been brought from Senegambia to London, where the cocoon was gently washed off and the fish found to be living. The naturalist Natterer dis covered similar fish in the Amazon, but this one, the lepidoslren of sci ence, is one of the rarest specimens in museums.
 In the United States there is fish, the bowfn, that can be drowned by stretching net below the surface of the water so that it cannot get to air.
 Dr. Hector, the government geologist of New Zealand, reported finding some fish about 51a inches long among the roots of trees at a depth of four feet in stiff clay. The place where they were found was some 37 feet above the Hokitika river, where there had been a backwater during a time of food. The mud fishes are common in New Zealand, and the early settlers were surprised to dig up fish with their potatoes, as farmers on Long Is- land are said to be in doubt whether their spades will unearth potatoes or clans.
 The most famous of the lung fishes is the climbing perch of India that has often been found several feet up the mangroves. These animals migrate overland when their own streams fail and are captured in great numbers by the natives, to whom they are great delIcacies. Ceylon has several species of them. The island is dotted over with bogs of thick, chocolate colored mud, covered by a sod of reeds and grasses. and this mud teens with fish. The Cingalese clear off space and wait till the fish come up to fill their air bladder, when they catch them In strong dip nets.
 Sir John Bowring says that some lung fishes In Siam go as much as three miles from water and that they have been seen Tapping along dusty road.
 The lung fishes constitute wonder full and interesting group of animals and show the wide range through which nature can adapt creatures to their surroundings. Biology is full of such instances. but few are more strik- ing than hls.-Washington Star.