454 Phthinobranchii 
where the water is shallow and warm and there are lots of 
seaweeds. So he wound his tail around a stem of seaweed 
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 under side of his tail where the skin is 
soft he made a long slit for a pocket, and 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 seawrack 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 all the little eggs began to hatch out, and each one of the: 
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 every one crawled away from him, and he couldn’t get 
them back, and so he went along with them and watched 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 seaweed and 
twisted his tail around it, and waited to see what would happen 
next. And what happened next was just the same thing over 
again.” 
Suborder Hypostomides, the Sea-moths: Pegasidz.—The small 
suborder of Hypostomides (tao, below; oréua, mouth) con- 
sists of the family of Pegaside. These ‘‘sea-moths’’ are 
fantastic little fishes, probably allied to the sticklebacks, but 
wholly unique in form. The slender body is covered with 
bony plates, the gill-covers are reduced to a single plate. The 
small mouth underneath a long snout has no teeth. The pre- 
opercle and the symplectic are both wanting. The ventrals 
are abdominal, formed of two rays, and the very large pec- 
toral fin is placed horizontally like a great wing. 
