610 



ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1908. 



island of St. Thomas, West Indies, in December, 1871. He gave a 

 very interesting account of the supposed nest in a letter to the super- 

 intendent of the United States Coast Survey, which was published in 

 the American Journal of Science and Arts for February, 1872, (third 

 series. Vol. Ill, pp. 154-156). The article was republished in whole 

 or part far and wide. He may declare for himself : 



The most interesting discovery of the voyage thus far is the finding of a nest 

 built by a fish floating on the broad ocean with its live freight. On the 13th 

 of the month [December], Mr. Mansfield, one of the officers of the Hassler, 

 brought me a ball of gulf weed which he had just picked up and which excited 

 my curiosity to the utmost. It was a round mass of sargassum, about the size 

 of two fists, rolled up together. The whole consisted to all appearance of 

 nothing but gulf weed, the branches and leaves of which were, however, evi- 

 dently knit together and not merely balled into a roundish mass ; for, though 

 some of the leaves and branches hung loose from the rest, it became at once 



visible that the bulk 

 of the ball was held 

 together by threads 

 trending in every 

 direction, among the 

 seaweed, as if a 

 couple of handfuls 

 of branches of sar- 

 gassum had been 

 rolled up together 

 with elastic threads 

 trending in every 

 direction. Put back 

 into a large bowl of 

 water, it became 

 apparent that this 

 mass of seaweed 

 was a nest, the cen- 

 tral part of which 

 was more closely 

 bound up together in the form of a ball, with several loose branches extending 

 in various directions, by which the whole was kept floating. 



A more careful examination very soon revealed the fact that the elastic 

 threads which held the gulf weed together were beaded at intervals, sometimes 

 two or three beads being close together, or a bunch of them hanging from the 

 same cluster of threads, or they were, more rarely, scattered at a greater dis- 

 tance one from the other. Nowhere was there much regularity observable in 

 the distribution of the beads, and they were found scattered throughout the 

 whole ball of seaweeds pretty uniformly. The beads themselves were about 

 the size of an ordinary pin's head. We had, no doubt, a nest before us, of the 

 most curious kind : full of eggs too ; the eggs scattered throughout the mass of 

 the nest and not placed together in a cavity of the whole structure. What 

 animal could have built this singular nest, was the next question. It did not 

 take much time to ascertain the class of the animal kingdom to which it belongs. 

 A common pocket lens at once revealed two large eyes upon the side of the 

 head, and a tail bent over the back of the body, as the embryo uniformly 

 appears in ordinary fishes shortly before the period of hatching. The many 



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Fig. 46. — Supposed nest of Pterophryne. After A. Agassiz. 



