ry, who thus specially
provides for the safety of his defenceless offspring. And what is odder
still, this topsy-turvy arrangement (as it seems to us) is the common
rule throughout the class of fishes. For the most part it must be
candidly admitted by their warmest admirer, fish make very bad parents
indeed. They lay their eggs anywhere on a suitable spot, and as soon as
they have once deposited them, like the ostrich in Job, they go on
their way rejoicing, and never bestow another passing thought upon
their deserted progeny. But if ever a fish _does_ take any pains in the
education and social upbringing of its young, you're pretty sure to
find on enquiry it's the father--not as one would naturally expect, the
mother--who devotes his time and attention to the congenial task of
hatching or feeding them. It is he who builds the nest, and sits upon
the eggs, and nurses the young, and imparts moral instruction (with a
snap of his jaw or a swish of his tail) to the bold, the truant, the
cheeky, or the imprudent; while his unnatural spouse, well satisfied
with her own part in having merely brought the helpless eggs into this
world of sorrow, goes off on her own account in the giddy whirl of
society, forgetful of the sacred claims of her wriggling offspring upon
a mother's heart.

In the pipe-fish family, too, the ardent evolutionist can trace a whole
series of instructive and illustrative gradations in the development of
this instinct and the corresponding pouch-like structure among the male
fish. With the least highly-evolved types, like the long-nosed
pipe-fish of the English Channel, and many allied forms from European
seas, there is no pouch at all, but the father of the family carries
the eggs about with him, glued firmly on to the service of his abdomen
by a natural mucus. In a somewhat more advanced tropical kind, the
ridges of the abdomen are slightly dilated, so as to form an open
groove, which loosely holds the eggs, though its edges do not meet in
the middle as in the great pipe-fish. Then come yet other more
progressive forms, like the great pipe-fish himself, where the folds
meet so as to produce a complete sac, which opens at maturity, to let
out its little inmates. And finally, in the common Mediterranean
sea-horses, which you can pick up by dozens on the Lido at Venice, and
a specimen of which exists in the dried form in every domestic museum,
the pouch is permanently closed by coalescence of the edges, leavin