OF SELBORNE. 71 
I have been informed, also, from undoubted au- 
thority, that some ladies (ladies, you will say, of 
peculiar taste) took a fancy to a toad, which they 
nourished, summer after summer, for many years, 
till he grew to a monstrous size, with the maggots 
which turn to flesh-flies. The reptile used to come 
forth every evening from a hole under the garden 
steps, and was taken up, after supper, on the table 
to be fed. But at last a tame raven, kenning him 
as he put forth his head, gave him such a severe 
stroke with his horny beak as put out one eye. 
After this accident the creature languished for some 
time and died. 
I need not remind a gentleman of your extensive 
reading of the excellent account there is from Mr. 
Derham, in Ray’s Wisdom of God in the Creation 
(p. 365), concerning the migration of frogs from 
their ponds. In this account he at once subverts 
that foolish opinion of their dropping from the clouds 
in rain, showing that it is from the grateful cool- 
ness and moisture of those showers that they are 
tempted to set out on their travels, which they defer 
till those fall. Frogs are as yet in their tadpole 
state ; but in a few weeks our lanes, paths, fields 
will swarm for a few days with myriads of those 
emigrants no larger than my little finger nail. How 
wonderful is the economy of Providence with regard 
to the limbs of so vile a reptile! While it is an 
aquatic it has a fish-like tail and no legs ; as soon 
as the legs sprout, the tail drops off as useless, and 
the animal betakes itself to the land ! 
Merret, I trust, is widely mistaken when he ad- 
vances that the rana arborea is an English reptile ; 
it abounds in Germany and Switzerland. 
