Page:The Book of the Aquarium and Water Cabinet.djvu/135

Rh the brook water be dipped to fill the jar with, and a few light weeds thrown in to supply oxygen. These larva are the produce of eggs deposited in a curious manner.

The gnats repair to the water soon after day-break, and commence an operation of a truly naval kind, such as would have delighted the savage heart of Peter the Great, could he have witnessed it in the midst of his dreams of achieving naval power. In fact, the mother gnats construct rafts of eggs, and each egg is added as a separate timber of the vessel, till a boat-like structure is produced. The skill as well as the necessity of the construction is well tested by the fact that each separate egg would of itself sink to the bottom, whereas being protruded one by one into the angle formed by the hind legs which serve as stocks for the future vessel, and successively glued to each other by the fluid which exudes with them, they gradually assume, under her guidance, a neat boat-like form of about three hundred minute pyramidal eggs.

“The most violent agitation,” says Kirby, “cannot sink it, and what is more extraordinary, and a property still a disideratumdesideratum [sic] in our life-boats, though hollow it never becomes filled with water, even though exposed.”

The grubs at last come forth, and lead a very merry sort of life under the shadow of the sedges. Placed in the jars they appear at first sight like newly hatched fry of fishes, but we soon detect the segments of their pellucid bodies, and, as might be expected in water larva, they breathe at the wrong end, and hence most of their merry movements are performed between the surface and the