318 THE VIVARIUM. 
every day. Already over 100,000 have been sold, and the remain- 
ing two months of the season will increase that amount to nearly 
300,000, which is but a moderate quantity, considering the 
already large and yearly increasing numbers which inhabit the 
river islands, and all along the shore of Canada. The article 
retails at from one Idol. to 50c. per 100.”—Buffalo Express 
(quoted by Science Gossip, 1st Sepember, 1867.) 
The Common Frog is a very useful animal, as it lives 
frequently upon such creatures as slugs, beetles, and  wire- 
worms. © It is surprising how many of: these (the last-mentioned) 
root-destroying larve one Frog will consume in twenty-four 
hours. 
The vitality of the common and other ground Frogs is amazing. 
This vitality has helped to give rise to the fables which we from 
time to time hear and read of, concerning their living buried in 
stone for thousands of years. ‘It inspires us,” says an extract 
which Mr. Frank Buckland quoted in the first series of his 
“Curiosities of Natural History,” ‘‘ witha kind of fear to be 
brought into contact with a living being that has, in all possi- 
bility, breathed the same air as Noah, or disported in the same 
limpid stream in which Adam bathed his sturdy limbs.” The 
above, which was written concerning a Frog found in a coal-pit, 
is an example of the kind of matter which is penned occasionally 
concerning the discovery of Frogs and Toads in out-of-the-way 
places. 
In speaking of the vitality of these creatures, a writer, in the 
Zoologist, L think, has stated that during some severe weather he 
found a Frog embedded in ice, and while breaking the ice he 
broke, by accident, a leg off the Frog. He thought no more of 
the circumstance, until, in the spring, he happened to see a Frog, 
minus a leg, swimming about in the water where the ice had 
been. He concluded, therefore, that this was the same Batra- 
chian which he had mutilated in the winter. 
It has been reported that in Australia, when a drought has 
been of so long a duration that horses, cattle, and even the 
marsupials have died for want of water, an hour or two’s steady 
rain has been sufficient to revive the Frogs, which have often 
been for more than a year torpid in the sun-baked mud. , 
