of the toad he confined a large specimen in a well- shaded box out of 

 doors. So ravenous was its appetite that to provide sufficient insect 

 food was quite a task until a satisfactory expedient suggested itself. 

 When a hard bread crust was soaked in molasses and placed in the 

 cage it attracted a sufficient number of flies, bees, ants, beetles, etc., 

 to keep the toad well supplied with food. The toad would sit motion- 

 less beside the bread crust until a moving insect came within range, 

 when its tongue would be thrown out with lightning-like rapidity and 

 the insect, often on the wing, would suddenly disappear within the 

 toad. The diet of this toad was varied with occasional fish worms, 

 which, being too large to swallow at once, were forced down the gullet 

 by means of the fore limbs. 



THE FOOD OF THE TOAD. 



As pointed out previously, the toad is of direct service to man by 

 reason of the noxious insects which it destroys. Should it feed on 

 beneficial insects, it would be to that extent an injurious animal. There 

 is only one way to determine accurately to what extent an insectivo- 

 rous animal is beneficial or injurious, and that is by a careful examina- 

 tion of the contents of a sufficiently large number of stomachs collected 

 at different dates and over a suitable range of territory. While field 

 observations furnish important circumstantial evidence and aid to an 

 understanding of the kind and condition of food found, the stomach 

 examinations, as Prof. F. E. L. Beal has so aptly put it, "constitute 

 the court of final appeal." Patience, strategy, and good eyesight will 

 enable one to study the feeding habits of such animals, but the absolute 

 identification of the kind and quantity of their food can not be made 

 at long range. For accurate results the material devoured must be 

 available for careful analysis, often under a microscope. 



The writer a few years ago collected and examined 149 toads' 

 stomachs, particular effort being made to secure representatives from 

 different sections and from a wide range of places, i. e., gardens, fields, 

 hills, woodlands, city streets, etc., during every month of the feeding 

 season. This number is doubtless too small to show the exact status of 

 the toad in the region covered, yet it is sufficient to afford interesting 

 data for some general conclusions. With the exception of a few 

 stomachs preserved in formalin, all were examined while fresh, the 

 stomachs being split along the outer curvature and the contents care- 

 fully washed into a glass dish. The material thus obtained was sepa- 

 rated into its proper groups, identified, and its percentage of the entire 

 bulk estimated and noted. The number of stomachs examined, by 

 months, was as follows: April, 7; May, 30; June, 66; July, 29; August, 

 10; September, T; total, 119. 



196 



