as various and variable in their mode of life as any other
great group in the animal kingdom. Monogamy and polygamy, socialism and
individualism, the patriarchal and matriarchal types of government, the
oviparous and viviparous methods of reproduction, perhaps even the
dissidence of dissent and esoteric Buddhism, all alike are well
represented in one family or another of this extremely eclectic and
philosophically unprejudiced class of animals.

If you want a perfect model of domestic virtue, for example, where can
you find it in higher perfection than in that exemplary and devoted
father, the common great pipe-fish of the North Atlantic and the
British Seas? This high-principled lophobranch is so careful of its
callow and helpless young that it carries about the unhatched eggs with
him under his own tail, in what scientific ichthyologists pleasantly
describe as a subcaudal pouch or cutaneous receptacle. There they hatch
out in perfect security, free from the dangers that beset the spawn and
fry of so many other less tender-hearted kinds; and as soon as the
little pipe-fish are big enough to look after themselves the sac
divides spontaneously down the middle, and allows them to escape, to
shift for themselves in the broad Atlantic. Even so, however, the
juniors take care always to keep tolerably near that friendly shelter,
and creep back into it again on any threat of danger, exactly as
baby-kangaroos do into their mother's marsupium. The father-fish, in
fact, has gone to the trouble and expense of developing out of his own
tissues a membranous bag, on purpose to hold the eggs and young during
the first stages of their embryonic evolution. This bag is formed by
two folds of the skin, one of which grows out from each side of the
body, the free margins being firmly glued together in the middle by a
natural exudation, while the eggs are undergoing incubation, but
opening once more in the middle to let the little fish out as soon as
the process of hatching is fairly finished.

So curious a provision for the safety of the young in the pipe-fish may
be compared to some extent, as I hinted above, with the pouch in which
kangaroos and other marsupial animals carry their cubs after birth,
till they have attained an age of complete independence. But the
strangest part of it all is the fact that while in the kangaroo it is
the mother who owns the pouch and takes care of the young, in the
pipe-fish it is the father, on the contra