244 Miscellaneous. 



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, evidently 

 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 sargassum 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 central 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 in- 

 tervals, 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 distance 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 empty egg-cases observed in the nest gave promise of an early 

 opportunity of seeing some embrj'os freeing themselves from their 

 envelope. Meanwhile a number of these eggs with live embryos were 

 cut out of the nest and placed in separate glass jars to multiply the 

 chances of preser\ing them, while the nest as a whole was secured in 

 alcohol, as a memorial of our unexpected discovery. The next day 

 I found two embiyos in one of my glass jars ; they occasionally moved 

 in jerks, and then rested for a long while motionless upon the bottom 

 of the jar. On the third day I had over a dozen of these young fishes 

 in my rack, the oldest of which began to be more active, and promised 

 to afford further opportunities for study. 



* * * * But what kind of fish was this ? About the time of hatch- 

 ing, the fins of this class of animals differ too much from those of the 

 adult, and the general form exhibits too few peculiarities, to afiford 

 any clue to this problem. I could only suppose that it would probably 

 prove to be one of the pelagic species of the Atlantic, and of these the 

 most common are Exocoetus, Naucrates, Scopelus, CJiironectes, Sy7i- 

 gnathus, Monacanthus, Tetraodon, and Diodon. Was there a way to 

 come nearer to a correct solution of my doubts ? 



As I had in former years made a somewhat extensive study of the 



