452 PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM vol. xxix. 



quote him, or say "fishermen report." It certainly is not true of 

 the pipefishes of Beaufort. In the dozens of cases in which males 

 were delivered of 3'ouno- in aquaria there, the parent and the young- 

 paid no attention to each other, the latter swimming- about uncon- 

 cernedly even when the father was caught with the hand and trans- 

 ferred to another tank. 



For Syngnathus ophldlon^ this observer declares that it is the male 

 which carries the eggs glued to the belly, and that if the fish is killed 

 the eggs come away easily in a mass. The latter is true of SlplifMoma 

 pyrldx^ and Rathke reports the same for the Black Sea species. 



Eckstroem was ignorant of Walcott's work and is due the credit for 

 discovering (1) that the male carries the eggs, (2) that there is a copula- 

 tion several times repeated, (3) that the embrj^os are nourished while in 

 the pouch — though not as he thought. When published, Eckstroem's 

 results started a great controversy, and he asked his friend Retzius to 

 undertake an independent investigation. This the latter did, by dis- 

 section, in 1833, and emphatically declared that Eckstroem was cor- 

 rect, that it is the male fish only which carries the eggs, and he won- 

 dered that anybody ever thought otherwise. 



In 1836, Yarrell made known Walcott's discovery and confirmed it 

 from his own dissections of ,5'. acus. He agrees with Walcott that 

 the 3^oung begin to breed when 3i inches long. The youngest 

 Siphostoma with a pouch, which the writer has seen, was 4^ inches 

 long and was laden with eggs. Walcott, Eckstroem, and Yarrell were 

 the first naturalists who broke away from the statements of the older 

 writers and investigated for themselves. 



In 1836, Rathke described from dissections the sexual organs of 

 8. variegatufi from the Black Sea. He excised the ovary of a fish 

 bearing eggs and described round bodies projecting on the inner walls 

 of the tubes. These he thought to be eggs in their follicles. In the 

 various forms of the Lophobranchs, however, the ovary contains a 

 nearly central raphe, from which eggs are budded off in a spiral, and, 

 even in a very young ovary, the eggs are of a yellow-red color. Sec- 

 tions of a testis reveal just such large vesicular cells as he has reported. 

 He described the skin-folds of the pouch as being resorbed at the end 

 of the breeding season, and correctly located the genital opening of 

 both sexes on the hinder edge of the anus. 



Rathke's larger and more important paper on the Syng-nathids of 

 the Black Sea appeared in the following year (1837), and while his 

 results are different from those of any other observer save Marcusen, 

 they are given with such careful attention to details that one must give 

 them some credence. He reports that the pouch is formed de novo 

 each breeding season and at its end is atrophied. He gives sections 

 through the tail to show this and declares that he has seen this change 

 many times. According to his figures, however, the horny dermal 



