Abstract
FOR, more than two thousand years, occasional showers of fish are said to have occurred in various parts of the world, but especially in India, in stormy, or at least showery, weather. In the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (29, No. 1; 1933), Dr. Sunder Lal Hora discusses Indian examples of the phenomenon, and gives references to papers dealing with these, some of which appeared more than a century ago. He also considers various explanations that have been advanced, and obviously inclines to the one according to which the fish in such a shower are sucked up from a pond or river by a waterspout and are deposited on the ground when the waterspout collapses. There is on the face of it no obvious objection to the theory, for the waterspout does sometimes occur in India, when the funnel-shaped tornado cloud that occasionally depends from a cumulo-nimbus cloud passes over any inland sheet of water. Dr. Hora's paper is followed by one by S. N. Sen, who for a number of years was on the staff of the Meteorological Office, London. Sen examines the meteorological conditions over India at the time when a recent shower of fishes was reported from the Muzaffarpur District, Bihar, on July 10, 1933, and finds that they were such as would frequently give rise to very disturbed cyclonic weather and violent thunderstorms, and that some notably heavy rains occurred on the day in question. The theory favoured by Dr. Hora remains, however, to be proved. One is tempted to think that what has generally been observed has been heavy rain and afterwards many small fish on the ground, but not a shower of fish, and that the minds of native observers of the two separate phenomena have been affected by mythological beliefs that seemed to offer an explanation of what had been observed. Dr. Hora refers to such a myth (a Hindu myth) connected with the rain-god Indra, according to which the waterspout is the trunk of one of Indra's elephants (the rain clouds are believed to be his elephants), who are engaged in sucking water up from the underworld during a storm in which the funnel cloud appears.
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Showers of Fish. Nature 134, 454 (1934). https://doi.org/10.1038/134454c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/134454c0