i Ae NATURAL HISTORY 
It is to be remembered that the salamandra 
aquatica of Ray (the water-newt or eft) will fre- 
quently bite at the angler’s bait, and is often caught 
on his hook. I used to take it for granted that 
the salamandra aquatica was hatched, lived, and 
died in the water. But John Ellis, Esq., F.R.S. 
(the coralline Ellis), asserts, in a letter to the Royal 
Society, dated June the 5th, 1766, in his account 
of the mud inguana, an amphibious bipes from 
South Carolina, that the water-eft or newt is only 
the larva of the land-eft, ‘as tadpoles are of frogs. 
Lest I should be suspected to misunderstand his 
meaning, | shall give it in hisown words. Speak. 
ing of the opercula, or coverings to the gills of the 
mud inguana, he proceeds to say, that “ The form 
of these pennated coverings approaches very near 
to what I have some time ago observed in the 
larva or aquatic state of our English /acerta, known 
by the name of eft or newt, which serve them for 
coverings to their gills, and for fins to swim with 
while in this state ; and which they lose, as well 
as the fins of their tails, when they change their 
state and become land animals, as I have observed 
by keeping them alive for some time myself.” 
Linnzeus, in his Systeme Nature, hints at what 
Mr. Ellis advances more than once. 
Providence has been so indulgent to us as to 
allow of but one venomous reptile of the serpent 
kind in these kingdoms, and that is the VIPER. 
As you propose the good of mankind to be an ob- 
ject of your publications, you will not omit to men- 
tion common salad oil as a sovereign remedy against 
the bite of the viper. As to the blind worm (angwis 
fragilis, so called because it snaps in sunder with a 
