NONSUCH 



impulse the individual seahorse motes assumed in- 

 dividual activity, swimming, twining their tails 

 around themselves and one another, lashing out 

 from side to side for all the world like diminutive 

 crocodiles. With all this casual indirective move- 

 ment there was a steady stampede of each successive 

 herd toward the surface; as a scientist I would 

 describe it as positively phototropic. 



Five more parental HE explosions took place 

 before the pouch was empty, and the fourth and 

 fifth were both still ball-like, revolving slowly up- 

 ward, while the earlier ones had spread out into 

 a subsurface film of frisking young Hippocampi. 



The pouch did not collapse as I expected it 

 would, but for another half -hour was only slightly 

 shrunken. Yet the last of the young had emerged 

 — three hundred and six in all. This was the end, 

 and in the morning the parent's pouch was indis- 

 tinguishable and the green color had given way to 

 a suit of dark brown, starred with white and faced 

 with yellow-green. And father and young were 

 doing well. 



The story was once told and has been repeated 

 many times of how the young seahorses return, at 

 the approach of danger, to their father's pouch. 

 It is a charming idea but is quite untrue. There is 

 no bond between offspring and parent once they 

 are shot out of his pocket, and their instinct to 

 swim up to the surface and toward the light is 

 wholly unlike his ideas of a proper trajectory — 

 which is down and among the protective fronds of 



236 



