166 FISH AS FATHERS. 



made of fibres of waterweeds or stalks of grass, and is 

 open at both ends to let a current pass through. As 

 soon as the lordly little polygamist has built it, he coaxes 

 and allures his chosen mates into the entrance, one by 

 one, to lay their eggs ; and then when the nest is full, 

 he mounts guard over them bravely, fanning them with 

 his fins, and so keeping up a continual supply of oxygen 

 which is necessary for the proper development of the 

 embryo within. It takes a month's sitting before the 

 young hatch out, and even after they appear, this 

 excellent father (little Turk though he be, and savage 

 warrior for the stocking of his harem) goes out attended 

 by all his brood whenever he sallies forth for a morning 

 constitutional in search of caddis-worms, which shows 

 that there may be more good than we imagine, after all, 

 in the domestic institutions even of people who don't 

 agree with us. 



The bullheads or miller's thumbs, those quaint big- 

 headed beasts which divide with the sticklebacks the polite 

 attentions of ingenious British youth, are also nest- 

 builders, and the male fish are said to anxiously watch 

 and protect their offspring during their undisciplined 

 nonage. Equally domestic are the habits of those queer 

 shapeless creatures, the marine lump-suckers, which 

 fasten themselves on to rocks, like limpets, by their 

 strange sucking disks, and defy all the efforts of enemy 

 or fishermen to dislodge them by main force from their 

 w^ell-chosen position. The pretty little tropical walking- 

 fish of the filuroid tribe — those fish out of water- 

 carry the nest-making instinct a point further, for 

 they go ashore boldly at the beginning of the rainy 



