50 STRICTLY INCOG. 



STRICTLY INCOG. 



AMONG the reefs of rock upon the Australian coast, an 

 explorer's dredge often brings up to the surface some 

 tangled tresses of reddish seaweed, which, when placed for 

 a while in a bucket of water, begin slowly to uncoil them- 

 selves as if endowed with animal life, and finally to swim 

 about with a gentle tremulous motion in a mute inquiring 

 way from side to side of the pail that contains them. 

 Looked at closely with an attentive eye, the complex 

 moving mass gradually resolves itself into two parts : one a 

 ruddy seaweed with long streaming fronds ; the other, a 

 strangely misshapen and dishevelled pipe-fish, exactly imi- 

 tating the weed itself in form and colour. When removed 

 from the water, this queer pipe-fish proves in general out- 

 line somewhat to resemble the well-known hippocampus or 

 sea-horse of the aquariums, whose dried remains, in a 

 mummified state, form a standing wonder in many tiny 

 domestic museums. But the Australian species, instead of 

 merely mimicking the knight on a chess-board, looks rather 

 like a hippocampus in the most advanced stage of lunacy, 

 with its tail and fins and the appendages of its spines flattened 

 out into long thin streaming filaments, utterly indistinguish- 

 able in hue and shape from the fucus round which the 

 creature clings for support with its prehensile tail. Only a 

 rude and shapeless rough draught of a head, vaguely horse- 

 like in contour, and inconspicuously provided with an un- 

 obtrusive snout and a pair of very unnoticeable eyes, at all 



