Phthinobranchii 239 



where the water is shallow and warm and there are lots of 

 seaweeds. So he wound his tail around a stem of seaweed 

 and hung with his head down, waiting to see what would happen 

 next, and then he saw another little sea-horse hanging on 

 another seaweed. And the other sea-horse put out a lot of 

 little eggs, and the little eggs all lay on the bottom of the sea 

 at the foot of the seaweed. So Hippocampus crawled down 

 from the seaweed where he was and gathered up all those little 

 eggs, and down on the under side of his tail where the skin is 

 soft he made a long slit for a pocket, and then he stuffed all 

 the eggs into this pocket and fastened it together and stuck it 

 with some slime. So he had all the other sea-horse's eggs in 

 his own pocket. 



"Then he went up on the seawrack again and twisted his 

 tail around it, and hung there with his head down to see what 

 would happen next. The sun shone down on him, and by and 

 by all the little eggs began to hatch out, and each one of the 

 eggs was a little sea-pony, shaped just like a sea-horse. And 

 when he hung there with his head down he could feel all the 

 little sea-ponies squirming inside his pocket, and by and by 

 they squirmed so much that they pushed the pocket open, 

 and then every one crawled away from him, and he couldn't get 

 them back, and so he went along with them and watched to 

 see that nothing should hurt them. And by and by they hung 

 themselves all up on the seaweeds, and they are hanging there 

 yet. And so he crawled back to his own piece of seaweed and 

 twisted his tail around it, and waited to see what would happen 

 next. And what happened next was just the same thing over 

 again." 



Suborder Hypostomides, the Sea-moths: Pegasidae. The small 

 suborder of Hypostomides (VTTO, below; aro^a, mouth) con- 

 sists of the family of Pegasida. These "sea -moths" are 

 fantastic little fishes, probably allied to the sticklebacks, but 

 wholly unique in form. The slender body is covered with 

 bony plates, the gill-covers are reduced to a single plate. The 

 small mouth underneath a long snout has no teeth. The pre- 

 opercle and the symplectic are both wanting. The ventrals 

 are abdominal, formed of two rays, and the very large pec- 

 toral fin is placed horizontally like a great wing. 



