ANIMAL AND PLANT LORE. 379 



to be met with in various parts of New England. This is only 

 one of many outgrowths of the old superstition regarding the 

 "venom" of the toad. The Swabian folk medicine, according to 

 Dr. Buck, credits toad-spittle with being very poisonous, and mere 

 contact with a toad is said to cause a limb to swell, especially if 

 the animal has first been made angry. Levinus Lemnius speaks 

 decidedly of the poisonous character of these really harmless 

 creatures ; but it is needless to multiply quotations to show how 

 general has been the belief that toads and all pertaining to them 

 were poisonous to man. 



Occurring in great abundance in summer upon the young 

 shoots of many plants, and especially upon the culms of grasses, 

 the little flecks of froth in which are concealed the pupa of the 

 frog-hoppers or spittle insects (Cercopidce) are not popularly 

 known to be the exudation of an insect, but are supposed to be 

 the spittle of some animal, and hence the substance has received a 

 variety of common names. I find the name " toad-spit " given to 

 this exudation in eastern Massachusetts, parts of Maine and 

 northern New Brunswick, and the same name is applied to it in 

 parts of England and in the Isle of Jersey. In Jersey the old 

 notion of the toad's venomous character obtains and its spittle is 

 thought to be poisonous, " to poison the blood," as the peasants say ; 

 so of course the " toad-spit " upon the plants, being thought to be 

 veritable saliva of toads, is avoided. A woman from Bathurst, 

 New Brunswick, tells me that the so-called toad-spit is frequently 

 found on wild strawberry plants, and the berry-pickers are careful 

 not to gather any fruit on which is to be seen any of this much- 

 feared pseudo-spittle, for, as she says, " you know the berries would 

 be rank poison, for toads are very poisonous ; they take all the 

 poison out of whatever they touch. If they are in a well, they suck 

 up all the poison out of the'water, and so, when they spit, of 

 course, this poison will be in their spit." In Reading, Mass., the 

 exudation of the tiny creature, lurking unsuspected, within its 

 frothy covering, is called either toad-spit or snake-spit, and bare- 

 footed children fear to let it touch their feet, as the saying is that 

 it will blister the skin. Snake-spit is the name applied to the 

 excretion in many other localities in New England. In Ipswich, 

 Mass., children say that if you make a wish and then break 

 off a certain number twenty-five, I believe of grass-stalks 

 without losing the snake-spit on any one of them, your wish will 

 surely come true. In parts of the Maritime Provinces of Canada 

 and in Staffordshire, England, frog-spit is another name for the 

 foamy masses. When a child, in northern Ohio, I remember to 

 have often seen the grasses along the roadside besprinkled with the 

 spit-like substance. I never heard any one speak of it, and I care- 

 lessly concluded that it was blown upon the grass by passing horses 



