shufeldt] THE SEA HORSE 145 



WHAT DR. JORDAN SAID ABOUT A SEA HORSE 



"He was a little bit of a sea horse, and his name was Hippo- 

 campus. He was not more than an inch long, and he had a red 

 stripe on the fin on his back, and his head was made of bone, and 

 it had a shape just like a horse's head, but he ran out to a point at 

 his tail, and his head and his tail were all covered with bone. He 

 lived in the Grand Lagoon at Pensacola in Florida, where the water 

 is shallow and warm and there are lots of seaweeds. So he wound 

 his tail around a stem of a sea- wrack and hung with his head down, 

 waiting to see what would happen next, and then he saw another 

 little sea horse hanging on another seaweed. And the other sea 

 horse put out a lot of little eggs, and the little eggs all lay on the 

 bottom of the sea at the foot of the seaweed. So Hippocampus 

 crawled down from the seaweed where he was and gathered up all 

 those little eggs, and down on the underside of his tail where the 

 skin is soft, he made a long slit for a pocket, then he stuffed all the 

 eggs into this pocket, and fastened it together, and stuck it with 

 some slime. So he had all the other sea horse's eggs in his own 

 pocket. 



Then he went up on the sea- wrack again, and twisted his tail 

 around it, and hung there with his head down, to see what would 

 happen next. The sun shone down on him, and by and by the 

 little eggs began to hatch out, and each one of the little eggs was a 

 little sea pony, shaped just like a sea horse. And when he hung 

 there with his head down he could feel all the little sea ponies 

 squirming inside his pocket, and by and by they squirmed so much 

 that they pushed the pocket open, and then even* one crawled out 

 and got away from him, and he couldn't get them back, and so he 

 went along with them and watched them to see that nothing should 

 hurt them. And by and by they hung themselves all up on the 

 seaweeds, and they are hanging there yet. And so he crawled back 

 to his own piece of sea-wrack, and twisted his tail around it again, 

 and waited to see what would happen next. And what happened 

 next was just the same thing over again." — David Starr Jordan 

 in Fish Stories published by Henry Holt, a very interesting book 

 for the school library. 



