Toads enclosed in Stone and Wood. 319 
each in a small basin of plaster of Paris, four inches deep and five inches 
in diameter having a cover of the same material carefully luted round 
with clay; these were buried at the same time and in the same place 
with the blocks of stone, and on being examined at the same time with 
them in December, 1826, two of the Toads were dead, the other two 
alive but much emaciated. We can only collect from this experiment 
that a thin plate of plaster of Paris is permeable to air in a sufficient 
degree to maintain the life of a Toad for thirteen months. 
In the 19th vol. No. 1, p. 167, of Silliman’s American Journal of 
Science and Arts, David Thomas, Esy. has published some observations 
ou Frogs and Toads in stone and solid earth, enumerating several authentic 
and well attested cases ; these, however, amount tono more than a repe- 
tition of the facts so often stated and admitted to be true, viz. that torpid 
reptiles occur in cavities of stone, and at the depth of many feet in soil 
and earth, but, they state not anything to disprove the possibility of a 
small aperture by which these cavities may have had communication with 
the external surface, and insects | ave been admitted. 
The attention of the discoverer is always directed more to the Toad, 
than to the minutiz of the state of the cavity in which it was contained. 
In the Literary Gazette of March 12, 1831, p. 169, there is a very 
interesting account of the habits of a tame male Toad, that was domesti- 
cated and carefully observed during almost two years by Mr. F. C. 
Husenbeth. During two winters, from November to March, he ate no 
food, though he did not become torpid, but grew thin and moved much 
less than at other times. During the winter of 1828 he gradually lost his 
appetite and gradually recovered it. He was well fed during two 
summers, and after the end of the second winter, on the 29th of March, 
1829, he was found dead. His death was apparently caused by an 
unusually long continuance of severe weather, which seemed to exhaust 
him before his natural appetite returned. He could nct have died from 
starvation, for the day before his death he refused a lively fly. 
Dr. Townson also, in his Tracts on Matural History, (London, 1799,) 
records a series of observations which he made on tame Frogs, and also 
on some Toads; these were directed chiefly to the very absorbent power 
of the skin of these reptiles, and show that they take in and reject liquids, 
through their skin alone, by a rapid process of absorption and evaporation, 
