i^ISH AS FATHERS. 167 



season in their native woods, and scoop out a hole in 

 the beach as a place of safety, in which they make 

 regular nests of leaves and other terrestrial materials 

 to hold their eggs. Then father and mother take turns- 

 about at looking after the hatcliing, and defend 

 the spawn with great zeal and courage against all 

 intruders. 



I regret to say, however, there are other unprincipled 

 lish which display their affection and care for their young 

 in far more questionable and unpleasant manners. For 

 instance, there is that uncanny creature that inserts its 

 parasitic fry as a tiny egg inside the unsuspecting shells 

 of mussels and cockles. Our fishermen are only too well 

 acquainted, again, with one unpleasant marine lamprey, 

 the hag or borer, so called because it lives parasitically 

 upon other fishes, whose bodies it enters, and then slowly 

 eats them up from within outward, till nothing at all is left 

 of them but skin, scales, and skeleton. They are 

 repulsive eel-shaped creatures, blind, soft, and slimy ; 

 their mouth consists of a hideous rasping sucker ; and 

 they pour out from the glands on their sides a copious 

 mucus, which makes them as disagreeable to handle as 

 they are unsightly to look at. Mackerel and cod are 

 the hag's principal victims ; but often the fisherman 

 draws up a hag-eaten haddock on the end of his line, of 

 which not a wrack remains but the hollow shell or bare 

 outer simulacrum. As many as twenty of these disgust- 

 ing parasites have sometimes been found within the body 

 of a single cod-fish. 



Yet see how carefully nature provides nevertheless 

 for the due reproduction of even her most loathsome and 



