8o GENERATION OF INSECTS 



of a dissecting knife, when it will be seen that the hind- 

 legs and the tail are separate members of the body; and 

 if the frog be kept in an aquarium it will be seen to 

 swim about for several days equipped with its tail as well 

 as its four legs. 



What shall I say in regard to those frogs or toads 

 which people believe are rained down from the clouds 

 in summer, or are created in the dust by the raindrops? 

 I have treated the subject at length in my " Observations 

 on Vipers," in which I said that those small frogs ap- 

 pearing during a shower have already been hatched sev- 

 eral days before, and have meanwhile hidden during the 

 dry weather among bushes, behind stones, or in holes, 

 and being of the same color as the soil, it is not easy to 

 distinguish them from the ground on which they squat. 

 The fact, also, that their stomachs are full of food and 

 their intestines full of excrement, at the moment when 

 they are supposed to have been born, appears to me a 

 clear contradiction of the truth of this account, which 

 dates from the 114th Olympiad, and was recited in the 

 peripatetic school of Theophrastus Eresius, the successor 

 of Aristotle. A fragment of Theophrastus' s book about 

 animals which make sudden appearances may be found 

 in the Library of Fozio, to which I refer you, as I wish 

 to speak of something else. 



As I asserted above my disbelief in the statement that 

 animals had been found, in the fields inundated by the 

 Nile, that were partly composed of pure earth, so it is 

 equally difficult for me to believe that trees and plants 

 may produce creatures of similar nature, found to be half 

 alive and half of inanimate wood, as if incomplete; and 

 though the aforesaid Father Athanasius Kircher, in the 

 second volume of " The Subterranean World," writes 



