A Drained Fishpond by Grant Allen — Read

I CALLED in at my neighbour Major Warren Pauncefote's this afternoon, and found he was just engaged in draining the fishpond by his garden. He is going to deepen it and to puddle the bottom, so as to make it fit for his boys to swim in. Meanwhile he has transferred all the larger carp to a stone trough in the back yard, where I saw at once there was not half enough water for them. I'm sure he didn't mean to be cruel, for he is the humanest soldier that ever spitted Fuzzy-wuzzy in the Soudan on his sword; but all the same, to any one who understands the prime needs of fish-life, the condition of those poor carp was most sad to look at. As every one knows, they breathe the oxygen dissolved in water; and as hundreds of them were confined in this Black Hole of Calcutta, the amount at their disposal was, of course, quite inadequate.

Some of the poor things were dead or dying, turning on their lustreless sides in the pathetically helpless way of suffocating fish; the others kept coming up every now and then to the surface, gasping for breath, and gulping down great open-jawed mouthfuls of air, to relieve their misery. No doubt the oxygen they thus swallow enters the body-cavity, and slightly assists them in aërating the blood, though much of it, also, may pass in the ordinary way through the gills, which are the regular and normal respiratory organs. It is always interesting to me, however, to watch fish when they come up thus to drink air at the surface, as goldfish often do when thoughtlessly confined in too small a glass basin; for in this instinctive act, as modern biologists now generally allow, we have the first faint beginnings of the evolution of lungs and the habit of air-breathing.