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MRAP Directory 06
Page 10
Only once did he falter. In March, 1871, when the French sympathizers of his subjects exposed him as a German Prince and a Hohenzollern to great unpopularity, while the bankruptcy of the Jewish speculator to whom his railway schemes had been intrusted threw discredit upon his ideas of economic development, he summoned the members of the Provisional Government from whom he had accepted the crown and announced to them his decision to abdicate. Fortunately for Rumania, they succeeded in dissuading him from his purpose. The famous Conservative statesman, Lascar Catargi, formed a Ministry which held office for five years and enabled the ruler to turn the most dangerous corner of his reign. Thenceforward the path was comparatively clear, though by no means easy. It led to Rumanian participation in the Russo-Turkish war, to the conquest of national independence, and eventually, on May 22, 1881, to his coronation as King of Rumania, with a crown made of steel from a Turkish gun captured by Rumanian troops at Plevna.
The fowl's egg is formed in the body of the hen, and is, in fact, part of her body inclosed in a shell and detached. It contains a minute rudiment of a fowl; and when it is kept at a proper temperature by the hen's sitting upon it, or otherwise for three weeks, this rudiment grows, or develops, at the expense of the materials contained in the yolk and the white, into a small bird, the chick, which is then hatched and grows into a fowl. The animal, therefore, is produced by the development of a germ in the same way as the plant; and, in this respect, all plants and all animals agree with one another, and differ from all mineral matter.
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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