206 ANIMAL LIFE 



lamprey lifts stones with his sucker till a hole has been 

 made in the river-bed, and then the eggs are laid in a 

 sort of nest. The stickleback weaves a neater nest, 

 made of fibres cemented with glue, over which 

 the male hovers. The female pipe-fish makes a nurse 

 of the male. He carries the eggs in a special pocket 

 until they are hatched, and for some days afterwards 

 performs the part of an animated perambulator. 



In their efforts to guard their young, animals 

 adopt strange devices. Some frogs wind a string of 

 eggs round their bodies and hind feet ; others embed 

 them in a pouch carried between the shoulders ; the 

 male of one frog swallows the eggs, and stores them 

 in his cheek pouches, or croaking sacks, until they 

 swim out as tiny tadpoles. 



The reptiles bury their eggs deep, and leave them 

 to be hatched by the heat of decomposing vegetation 

 or by the heat of the sun. 



Many tropical birds make mounds of rotting 

 leaves over their buried eggs, as though to remind 

 us of their reptilian ancestry. But in the majority 

 of cases birds and insects, true to their high traditions, 

 show the most varied and complicated devices for the 

 safety and benefit of their offspring. 



Perhaps the best test of this statement is the record 

 of nests of known birds and insects found by any one 

 observer. Although all the nests of British birds 

 are known, few naturalists, after a lifetime of search, 

 are personally familiar with more than two-thirds of 

 those that occur in this country ; and, to take but one 



