Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/852

832 doorway. As he mats the fibers together by creeping over them with his body, he cements them firmly with the slimy mucus that exudes from his skin. He is a quick worker, not to say a jerry builder (any one can watch the whole process easily for himself in a fresh-water aquarium), and he only takes a few hours in getting the entire residence completed from basement to coping-stone. As soon as it is finished, the little architect sets out on his quest of a partner or partners ready to occupy it. If he meets a rival on the way, the two small Turks fight out their differences at once on the spot, while the bride-elect amicably stands by expectant, and accepts the conqueror. When she emerges from her hiding-place under the waving weeds and comes out, the guerdon of his prowess, to survey the nest he has deftly woven for her, the tiny sultan positively dances and curvets around her, "mad with delight," as an acute observer has well worded it. "he darts round her in every direction; then to his accumulated materials for the nest; then back again in an instant, and, as she does not advance, he endeavors to push her with his snout, and then tries to pull her by the tail and side-spine to the nest." Indeed, there is a deal more that is human and natural in the lives of all these little despised creatures than the people who laugh at theories of tittlebats have ever stooped to notice or discover.

As soon as the stickleback has duly inducted the partner of his choice with many caresses into the home he has built for her, or rather for her offspring, he introduces her by the door he has left in the side into the closed chamber. In a few minutes the bride has laid two or three tiny, transparent yellow eggs, after which she bores a hole with her snout on the side of the nest opposite to that by which she entered, and makes her exit, a divorced wife, without further formalities. "The nest," says Dr. Gunther, "has now two doors, and the eggs are exposed to the cool stream of water, which entering by one door flows out at the other." This, of course, by keeping up a fresh and constant current, supplies them with the oxygen necessary for hatching. Next day, the little sultan goes out again in quest of a fresh mate, and brings back his new bride to add a few more eggs to his stock of spawn. This operation he repeats daily until the nest is nearly full; and then the fond father sets to work himself at the congenial task of incubation. For among fish it is almost always the male, not the female, who sits upon the eggs and charges himself with the care and education of the young fry.

For the subsequent stages, I can not do better than quote Frank Buckland's animated account of a case observed by the learned curator of the Norwich Museum. "Nothing," says the genial naturalist and angler, "could exceed the attention from this time evinced by the male fish. He kept constant watch over the nest, every now and then shaking up the materials and dragging out the eggs, and then pushing them into their receptacles again and tucking them up with his snout,