Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 11, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 December 1874 — Subterranean Fishes. [ARTICLE]

Subterranean Fishes.

In boring artesian wells in the Desert of Sahara very small fishes, resembling the white-bait, not unfrequently occur, which inhabit the waters of the subterranean bed of the desert. They are identical with a species from the waters of Biskra. The male differs from the female in being transversely barred, so that some authors have regarded it as a distinct species. The eyes are well formed, although these fishes live a part of the time in obscurity. It seems that as far back as 1849 the Governor of the oases of Thebes and Gaibe, in Egypt, stated that an artesian well, about 105 feet deep, which he had cleaned out, furnished for his table fishes which probably came from tbe Nile, as the sand which he had brought up from this artesian well was identical with that of this river. In the Sahara, as in Egypt, these fishes were carried away by the waters, which filtered into the soil down to the subterranean sheet into which the artesian wells open» Gervais claims to have established the fact that these subterranean fishes are essentially fluviatile, and that some like them are found in the rivers of Senegal and Mozambique, of Syria and Egypt, ofthe Therian peninsula, and even America. Their fossil representatives are not found in deposits of marine origin, and all that we know occur in lacustrine formations. The existence of these fishes cannot, then, serve as an argument for the former presence of the waters of the Mediterranean on the soil of the north of Africa .—Harper's Magazine.