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Cornugaya Directory 03
Page 05
In the Circumcision and Purification chapel--for both these events
seem contemplated in the one that follows--there are doves, but
there is neither dog nor knife. Still Simeon, who has the infant
Saviour in his arms, is looking at him in a way which can only mean
that, knife or no knife, the matter is not going to end here. At
Varallo they have now got a dreadful knife for the Circumcision
chapel. They had none last winter. What they have now got would do
very well to kill a bullock with, but could not be used
professionally with safety for any animal smaller than a rhinoceros.
I imagine that some one was sent to Novara to buy a knife, and that,
thinking it was for the Massacre of the Innocents chapel, he got the
biggest he could see. Then when he brought it back people said
"chow" several times, and put it upon the table and went away.
In No. 4 we have an illustration of the tube-mouth or Solenostoma, one
of the two known kinds of fish in which the female shows a sense of
her position as a mother. The tube-mouth, as you can see at a glance,
is a close relation of our old friend the seahorse, whose disguised
and undisguised forms in Australia and the Mediterranean we have
already observed when dealing with the question of animal
masqueraders. Solenostoma is a native of the Indian Ocean, from
Zanzibar to China. In the male, the lower pair of fins are separate,
as is usual among fish; but in the female, represented in the
accompanying sketch, they are lightly joined at the edge, so as to
form a sort of pouch like a kangaroo's, in which the eggs are
deposited after being laid, and thus carried about in the mother's
safe keeping. No. 5 shows the arrangement of this pouch in detail,
with the eggs inside it. The mother Solenostoma not only takes charge
of the spawn while it is hatching in this receptacle, but also looks
after the young fry, like the father stickleback, till they are of an
age to go off on their own account in quest of adventures. The most
frequent adventure that happens to them on the way is, of course,
being eaten.
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