334 THE VIVARIUM. 
den, watching, with all the gravity of his genus, for prey. Many 
insects are attracted by a hiding-place similar to that chosen by 
the Toad, and as they enter, the occupant of the abode bends 
slightly forward, its bright eye flashes, and its tongue is shot 
out and withdrawn with wonderful rapidity, and the unfortunate 
creatures find a retreat from which there is no escape. In course 
of time the Toad, as he grows, discovers that the opening to the 
den has become too narrow to admit its body without consider- 
able inconvenience. And as the den is comfortable, and the 
passage out tedious, it remains within until it becomes too big to 
leave at all. Perhaps it lives thus, a prisoner, for a year or two, 
eating and growing, until it is freed by a chance stroke of a work- 
man’s pick. As the man has not noticed the narrow opening to 
the little den, he concludes, or others do to whom he relates the 
incident, that the Toad has been embedded in the stone for ages. 
Some such explanation as this will account, no doubt, for many 
an embedded Batrachian. 
Toads are not very particular as to their food so long as it is 
small enough to enter their mouths, and is alive and moving. 
They will eat worms, maggots, flies, bees, wasps, slugs (but not 
readily); and occasionally tiny snakes, newts, young hairless 
mice, and the like. Sometimes they will attack any small thing 
that is moving, such as a twig waved before them. In this way 
they can be persuaded to take raw meat, or dead insects, or even 
burning cinders, as the following interesting quotation taken from 
the Field of 27th May, 1893, will show :—‘‘ Los sapos comen fuego 
(the Toads eat fire) is a common saying among the natives of the 
northern provinces of the Argentine Confederation, and that it 
is a fact, this fire-eating, or rather red-hot cinder-eating, the 
following will prove. When employed by a large firm of S. 
American contractors at a junction of the Central Cordoba 
Railway—Frias by name, I lived in a house which had a long 
verandah at the back, which looked on to an enclosed yard. At 
night we were in the habit of dining on the verandah by the light 
of a kerosene lamp affixed to the wall. This lamp attracted in- 
numerable beetles and insects of all sorts, which, flying against 
the glass, fell to the ground, to be instantly snapped up by an 
expectant crowd of Toads. One night one of the party suggested 
