Page:Sea and River-side Rambles in Victoria.djvu/64

45 continuous line, with only one tail for the six. The tail indeed is the family inheritance, but reversing the laws of primogeniture, it always descends to the youngest; like that elaborate display of baby linen which was worked with such fondness for the first-born, and has become in turns the costume of successive pledges as they appeared on this scene of life with a constant diminendo of interest in all but parental eyes. The separation finally takes place, and then we perceive the children and grand-children are not quite the same as their ancestor." As we have before mentioned, the fact had not hitherto been observed in the group Tubicola, (or animal flowers), yet two of our author's Terebellæ gave him a sight of it. "The first," he tells us, "died before the separation took place; the second, after a day or two's captivity, separated itself from its appendix of a baby, and seemed all the livelier for the loss of a juvenile which had been literally in that condition of 'hanging to its mother's tail,' which I have heard applied in metaphorical sarcasm to small boys anxious to be with their mothers. The young one only lived four days." We need not apologise for this long extract, it is the most graphic description we have met with for many a day, and we only wish we could follow out the author's learned arguments in confirmation of the experiments of Bonnet and M. Peltier.

But what means that piteous cry from our companion on a-head who is wading about sans shoes, sans stockings? Has a monster Poulpe taken fancy to his posterior extremities, or has some daring young Mollusk, caught in the act of shoeing her pretty foot,