342 MOSTLY MAMMALS 



a special pouch borne on the body of the female until 

 sufficiently advanced to take care of themselves. In the 

 females of certain other members of the same order — 

 namely, some of the American opossums — the young are 

 carried on the parental back, with their own tails tightly 

 twisted round that of their mother. In another group, the 

 female spiny ant-eater, or echidna, carries about her egg in a 

 pouch developed in the breeding season on the under-surface 

 of her body. Most bats carry their helpless offspring tightly 

 clinging to their breasts, and the females of many lemurs 

 bear them clinging transversely across the under-surface of 

 the lower part of their bodies. There is, however, one bat — 

 namely, the naked Chironieles torquata — in which both sexes 

 are provided with a pouch on the chest. In this pouch the 

 female carries her offspring ; and it is thought probable that 

 when there are two, the male may assist his partner by 

 relieving her of one. Among mammals, such instances are 

 rare, but among amphibians there are numerous instances 

 where the eggs or young are carried about, either attached 

 to the skin or borne in special receptacles. 



Commencing with that group of amphibians represented 

 by the frogs and toads, we find among these various 

 instances of abnormal ways of protecting their young 

 during the early stages of development, one of which has 

 been known for nearly a couple of centuries, while many 

 of the others have but recently been described. So far 

 back as the year 1705, Fraulein Sibylla von Merian, in a 

 work on the reptiles of Surinam, described a remarkable 

 toad-like creature, in which the young are carried in a 

 series of cells in the thick skin of the back of the female, 

 which at this period has a honeycomb-like appearance. 

 Till a few years ago, when a living example was received 

 by the London Zoological Society, the Surinam toad {Pipa 



