38 
while from their smooth polished exterior and beau- 
tifal arrangement, they ensure the best possible 
resistance from the surrounding medium as the fish 
glides along.” (Animal Kingdom, ch. xavi. section 541.) 
Now in the syngnathide, in all which fishes, the 
sexual economy is so strangely ordered as I have said 
it is in the hippocampus, the whole body is covered 
with a strong armour, composed of broad dermal 
plates, moving in protuberant fibrous folds of the 
living cutis. This structure is the very reverse of 
that of the trunk-fishes, the ostracionide. There © 
the integument becomes a strong box made of poly- 
gonal plates, set out like a tiled pavement, with no 
cuticular interstitial folds. The tail and the fins - 
alone are moveable in trunk-fishes ; the rest is as 
infrexible as a steam-engine boiler. The whole frame 
2s moveable in the hippeeampus. 
The female hippocampus, when the abdomen is 
enlarged with eggs, opens the male marsupial pouch, 
by means of the small anal fin of five rays, an ap- 
pendage not existing in the male, and_ transfers 
from herself to the being to become the father, the 
ova for fecundation. Now to accomplish the pa- 
rental office in this reversal of reproduction, by 
which the female becomes the intromittant sex, and 
the male, we may say the child-bearing, parent the 
power of intertwining with each other is assigned 
‘to the fish-structure, and the highest degree of flexi- 
bility is given to the spinal column. I know few 
objects more calculated to excite interest in a fugi- 
tive observer cf nature, or.to occupy more plea- 
sureably the attention of a sea-side invalid confined 
1 
ee 
