Pond Life 
water-weeds, as do some of the other 
fish, it might be possible that a piece of 
the weed with the eggs on it might have 
been brought to the pond by some animal 
or water-bird accidentally; but they 
could not very well have brought away 
the nest. Living things are, it is well 
known, distributed in this curious fashion 
all over the world. And there are, in 
fact, all sorts of these curious puzzles 
going on around us, and that is one 
reason why thé study of natural history 
is so extremely interesting. The only 
possible way I can think of is that the 
eggs of the stickleback have been 
brought along with some mud on 
a bird’s foot which had been wading 
about, or else that they may have been 
swallowed by a duck while grubbing 
about at the bottom of some other pond, 
85 
