342 MOSTLY MAMMALS 
a special pouch borne on the body of the female until 
sufficiently advanced to take care of themselves. In the 
females of certain other members of the same order— 
namely, some of the American opossums—the young are 
carried on the parental back, with their own tails tightly 
twisted round that of their mother. In another group, the 
female spiny ant-eater, or echidna, carries about her egg in a 
pouch developed in the breeding season on the under-surface 
of her body. Most bats carry their helpless offspring tightly 
clinging to their breasts, and the females of many lemurs 
bear them clinging transversely across the under-surface of 
the lower part of their bodies. There is, however, one bat— 
namely, the naked Chzromeles torquata—in which both sexes 
are provided with a pouch on the chest. In this pouch the 
female carries her offspring; and it is thought probable that 
when there are two, the male may assist his partner by 
relieving her of one. Among mammals, such instances are 
rare, but among amphibians there are numerous instances 
where the eggs or young are carried about, either attached 
to the skin or borne in special receptacles. 
Commencing with that group of amphibians represented 
by the frogs and toads, we find among these various 
instances of abnormal ways of protecting their young 
during the early stages of development, one of which has 
been known for nearly a couple of centuries, while many 
of the others have but recently been described. So far 
back as the year 1705, Fraulein Sibylla von Merian, in a 
work on the reptiles of Surinam, described a remarkable 
toad-like creature, in which the young are carried in a 
series of cells in the thick skin of the back of the female, 
which at this period has a honeycomb-like appearance. 
Till a few years ago, when a living example was received 
by the London Zoological Society, the Surinam toad (Pipa 
