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The full-grown fish runs to about ten inches in length, fisherman's scale, while the fry measure as much as three inches apiece; so that they lie, as Professor Seeley somewhat forcibly expresses it, 'packed in the body of the parent as close as herrings in a barrel. This strange habit of retaining the eggs till after they have hatched out is not peculiar to fish among egg-laying animals, for the common little brown English lizard is similarly viviparous, though most of its relatives elsewhere deposit their eggs to be hatched by the heat of the sun in earth or sandbanks.

He ran from one apartment to another, like a goose in the agonies of egg-laying, with intention of disburdening this important load; but Jolter being engaged with the pupil, and all the people of the house ignorant of the only language he could speak, he was compelled, with infinite reluctance, to address himself to the doctor, who was at that time shut up in his own chamber.

"Who's agreed?" asked the president. "Me!" responded the club, vociferously. They all had prudently concluded to wait for the advent of more daylight, and, withdrawing from the barn, went down the yard talking as busily as if they were a lot of hens cackling after a successful venture at egg-laying. It had been left to Charlie to put above the notice, "FAIR," the word "POSTPONED."

It is in the subsoil that they establish themselves and travel to and fro; with the help of their powerful mandibles, their hard cranium, their strong, prickly legs, they easily make themselves paths in the loose earth. They are living ploughshares. By the end of August, therefore, the female population is for the most part underground, busily occupied in egg-laying and provisioning.

Beginning with the lowest class, the Fishes are cold-blooded, they breathe through gills, and they are egg-laying; in other words, though they have the same general structure as the other Vertebrates, they have a special mode of circulation, respiration, and reproduction.

It presents no peculiarities. The only nymph that I have reared attained the perfect insect state at the end of September. Under ordinary conditions would the adult Oil-beetle have emerged from her cell at this period? I do not think so, since the pairing and egg-laying do not take place until the beginning of spring.

The last half-dozen birds, alert and anxious, dashed off upon a common impulse noisily. They roost in the jungle adjoining. A more sedate condition prevails in the demeanour of the birds, due peradventure to domestic responsibilities. Fewer are about, and they spend leisure moments on the top of or near the nests, while others pop in and out. Are these signs of the beginning of egg-laying?

This accommodating specimen had apparently just completed her egg-laying, or had perhaps just filled one nest; and while her attitude was precisely similar to that of her neighbor, I noticed a tiny ball of glistening froth at the tip of the ovipositor.

She quivered against him with the joy she took in the mellow-sweet notes. "The coveys are breaking up," he said. "It means spring," Paula cried. "And the sign that good weather has come." "And love!" "And nest-building and egg-laying," Dick laughed. "Never has the world seemed more fecund than this morning. Lady Isleton is farrowed of eleven.

Now here, now there, I shifted a few cubic yards of soil, without managing to find fresh provisions with the egg or the young larva. And yet it was the right season, the egg-laying season, for the males, numerous at the outset, had grown rarer day by day until they disappeared entirely.