A further remarkable case of care exercised by the father is that of Darwin’s frog, the _Rhinoderma darwini_, where the eggs are guarded in a great pouch under the throat, and opening by two slits into the mouth. During the courtship this pouch is used as a voice organ to charm the female, with sharp ringing notes like a bell. But the love-calls end with the birth of the family. There is now serious work to be accomplished. The father takes his wife’s eggs into his pouch, which now enlarges and extends backwards under the belly to the groin, and upwards on each side almost to the backbone. In the warm chamber thus formed, the tadpoles live until they become young frogs. They then make their way up through the doorways into their father’s mouth, and from that living nursery they swim out into the wide world. Well, what can we say of this case? We have heard of some animal fathers eating their progeny, but here the father’s mouth is turned into the hatching nursery. Did I not tell you we should find very much to astonish us? I could give many more examples of reptile parents whose family habits are more or less singular. There are the little-known “Cœcilians,”[20] the strange, snakelike amphibians of S.E. Asia and Ceylon; where the mother, with her limbless body, yet contrives to dig a nursery for her eggs, which she jealously guards. I should like to write of the families of the newts and salamanders, among whom the young are never completely abandoned, and whose parental habits present many features of interest. But to tell their life stories with all the vivid facts would take more space than I can allow to this one chapter of my book; and to give a bald record of their habits would afford little interest. I must, however, recount two instances of marked solicitude for the family, shown in each case by a different parent. Take the case of a mother’s care first. A captive mother-salamander, of the species known as _Oregon plethodon_, was placed with her eggs in a jar. She at once took possession of them, forming a loop around them with her tail. But, displeased with this unfamiliar house, she moved the eggs repeatedly from place to place till at length she was satisfied, and all the time using her tail for the work of transportation as a kind of maternal arm. In the second case the father most faithfully guards the eggs. A giant salamander in the Zoological Gardens of Amsterdam kept watch over a clump of his wife’s eggs for a period of ten weeks. This careful father was seen every now and then to crawl among the eggs and lift them up, apparently for the purpose of aerating them.