STRICTLY INCOG.

STRICTLY INCOG.






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Among the reefs of rock upon the Australian coast, an explorer's dredge
often brings up to the surface some tangled tresses of reddish seaweed,
which, when placed for a while in a bucket of water, begin slowly to
uncoil themselves as if endowed with animal life, and finally to swim
about with a gentle tremulous motion in a mute inquiring way from side
to side of the pail that contains them. Looked at closely with an
attentive eye, the complex moving mass gradually resolves itself into
two parts: one a ruddy seaweed with long streaming fronds; the other, a
strangely misshapen and dishevelled pipe-fish, exactly imitating the
weed itself in form and colour. When removed from the water, this queer
pipe-fish proves in general outline somewhat to resemble the well-known
hippocampus or sea-horse of the aquariums, whose dried remains, in a
mummified state, form a standing wonder in many tiny domestic museums.
But the Australian species, instead of merely mimicking the knight on a
chess-board, looks rather like a hippocampus in the most advanced stage
of lunacy, with its tail and fins and the appendages of its spines
flattened out into long thin streaming filaments, utterly
indistinguishable in hue and shape from the fucus round which the
creature clings for support with its prehensile tail. Only a rude and
shapeless rough draught of a head, vaguely horse-like in contour, and
inconspicuously provided with an unobtrusive snout and a pair of very
unnoticeable eyes, at all suggests to the most microscopic observer its
animal nature. Taken as a whole, nobody could at first sight distinguish
it in any way from the waving weed among which it vegetates.

Clearly, this curious Australian cousin of the Mediterranean sea-horses
has acquired so marvellous a resemblance to a bit of fucus in order to
deceive the eyes of its ever-watchful enemies, and to become
indistinguishable from the uneatable weed whose colour and form it so
surprisingly imitates. Protective resemblances of the sort are extremely
common among the pipe-fish family, and the reason why they should be so
is no doubt sufficiently obvious at first sight to any reflecting
mind--such, for example, as the intelligent reader's. Pipe-fish, as
everybody knows, are far from giddy. They do not swim in the vortex of
piscine dissipation. Being mostly small and defenceless creatures,
lurking among the marine vegetation of the shoals and reefs, they are
usually accustomed to cling for support by their snake-like tails to the
stalks or leaves of those submerged forests. The omniscient schoolboy
must often have watched in aquariums the habits and manners of the
common sea-horses, twisted together by their long thin bodies into one
inextricable mass of living matwork, or anchored firmly with a treble
serpentine coil to some projecting branch of coralline or of quivering
sea-wrack. Bad swimmers by nature, utterly unarmed, and wholly
undefended by protective mail, the pipe-fish generally can neither fight
nor run away: and therefore they depend entirely for their lives upon
their peculiar skulking and lurking habits. Their one mode of defence is
not to show themselves; discretion is the better part of their valour;
they hide as much as possible among the thickest seaweed, and trust to
Providence to escape observation.