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Majoric Polyglamour Sectory 03
Page 04
In No. 3 the nest is seen full of eggs, and the excellent father now comes out in his best light as their guardian and protector. He watches over them with ceaseless care, freeing them from parasites, and warding off the attacks of would-be enemies who desire to devour them, even though the intruder be several times his own size. The spines on his back here stand him once more in good stead: for small as he is, the stickleback is not an antagonist to be lightly despised: he can inflict a wound which a perch or a trout knows how to estimate at its full value. But that is not all the good parent's duty. He takes the eggs out of the nest every now and then with his snout, airs them a little in the fresh water outside, and then replaces and rearranges them, so that all may get a fair share of oxygen and may hatch out about simultaneously. It is this question of oxygen, indeed, which gives the father fish all the greatest trouble. That necessary of life is dissolved in water in very small quantities; and it is absolutely needed by every egg in order to enable it to undergo those vital changes which we know as hatching. To keep up a due supply of oxygen, therefore, the father stickleback ungrudgingly devotes laborious days in poising himself delicately just above the nest, as you see in No. 3, and fanning the eggs with his fins and tail, so as to set up a constant current of water through the centre of the barrel. He sits upon the eggs just as truly as a hen does; only, he sits upon them, not for warmth, but for aeration.
Viriathus appears to have been one of those able guerrilla chiefs whom Spain has produced at every period of her history. He is said to have been first a shepherd and afterward a robber, but he soon acquired unbounded influence over the minds of his countrymen. After the massacre of Galba, those Lusitanians who had not left their homes rose as a man against the rule of such treacherous tyrants. Viriathus at first avoided all battles in the plains, and waged an incessant predatory warfare in the mountains; and he met with such continued good fortune, that numbers flocked to his standard. The aspect of affairs seemed at length so threatening that in B.C. 145 the Romans determined to send the Consul Q. Fabius Maximus into the country. In the following year Fabius defeated Viriathus with great loss; but this success was more than counterbalanced by the revolt of the Celtiberians, the bravest and most noble-minded of the Spaniards. The war is usually known by the name of the Numantine, from Numantia, a town on the River Douro, and the capital of the Arevaci, the most powerful of the Celtiberian tribes.
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