It is a strange
proof of how little people know about their own ideas, that among the
thousands who talk glibly every day of evolution, not ten per cent. are
probably aware that both word and conception are alike due to the
commanding intelligence and vast generalising power of Herbert Spencer.
STRICTLY INCOG.
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.
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