29 



Living without air and food. — Occasionally one reads or hears a 

 story about a toad found in a cavity in a solid rock. When the rock 

 is broken open, it is vSaid that the toad wakes up and hops around as 

 if it had been asleep only half an hour. Just think for a moment 

 what it would mean to find a live toad within a cavity in a solid rock. 

 It must have been there for thousands, if not for miUions of years 

 without food or air. The toad does not like a long fast, but can stand 

 it for a year or so without food if it is in a moist place and supplied 

 with air. It regularly sleeps four or five months every winter, but 

 never in a place devoid of air. If the air were cut off the toad would 

 soon die. Some careful experiments were made by French scientific 

 men, and the stories told about toads living indefinitely without air or 

 food were utterly disproved. 



It is not difficult to see that one working in a quarry might honestly 

 think that he had found a toad in a rock. Toads are not very un- 

 common in quarries. If a stone were broken open and a cavity found 

 in it, and then a toad were seen hopping away, one might jump at the 

 conclusion that the toad came out of the cavity in the rock. Is not 

 this something like the behef that the httle toads rain down from the 

 clouds because they are most commonly seen after a shower ? 



Surveys and Maps. 



In considering the suggestions made in this leaflet, we thought of 

 the hundreds of schools throughout the state and wondered if there 

 might not be some difficulty in finding the ponds where the toads lay 

 their eggs, and in finding some of the things described in the other 

 leaflets. 



The teachers and students in Cornell University found this difficulty 

 twenty-eight years ago when the University opened. The great Louis 

 Agassiz came to the University at the beginning to give a course of 

 lectures on nature ^tudy. The inspiration of his presence and advice, 

 and of those lectures, lasts to this day. 



Agassiz, and the University teachers, who had many of them been 

 his pupils, saw at once that the region around Ithaca must be full of 

 interesting things; but they did not know exactly where to find them. 

 Agassiz himself made some explorations, and the professors and 

 students took hold of the work with the greatest enthusiasm. They 



