12 Toad found in the Trunk of a Beech. [Jory, 
this part of the subject, but to state to you a recent instance of one 
of those animals being found in a very singular situation. I was not 
an eye-witness; but the person who has charge of my father’s 
woods here, a man for whose integrity I can be answerable, told me 
the particulars. 
A quantity of timber being felled here, a wright, who had made 
some purchases, came to take his trees away, and amorgst the rest 
a beech, which had grown with a smooth, -straight, unbranched, 
stem of about 30 feet high, above which it divided into two large 
limbs. As this tree was lying on the ground, the wright and his 
man set about cross cutting it with a saw just below the cleft, when, 
to their surprise, the stem was no sooner divided than a large toad 
crept out of a circular hole, the upper and smaller patt of which - 
had been cut off by the saw. As far as I can make out from con- 
versation with the man above alluded to, the tree had all ‘the ap- 
pearance of being quite solid above ; yet I have no doubt that some 
slight, though perhaps almost imperceptible, communication, must 
have existed from the fork into the hole where the toad was lodged; 
and I am the more satisfied of this from the account which the man 
gives of the appearance of the interior of the hole, which seemed 
to be sheathed all round with something resembling bark. 
But the curious query arising from this fact is, how came a toad 
to be lodged so high? The toad has no power of crawling perpen- 
dicularly so as to have ascended the smooth bark of a straight tree 
to such a height. I know from my own observations that trees 
grow in altitude in two ways: Ist, Something is annually added to 
the height of the tree by the new shoots: and 2dly, in addition to 
this mode of increment, the whole tree seems to stretch itself yearly 
out of the ground, throughout its entire length, to a very consider- 
able extent, as I have proved by measuring the height of knots 
upon trees at different periods. But with all this I do not think it 
very rational to suppose that the cleft in question, which may have 
once extended quite down to the hole, could have ever existed so 
near the ground of a size sufficient to have admitted of a toad 
crawling into it. The only way in which it appears to me that this 
circumstance can be accounted for, is by supposing that the spawn, 
after being removed from the female by the obstetrical aid of the 
male toad, must have been transported and dropt into the cleft of 
the tree by some bird. 
As to what Pennant and others say of the obstetrical aid afforded 
by the male to the female toad, I am led to suspect that the object 
of the operation is more for the purpose of impregnating the spawn 
as it is dragged from the female than any thing else. It appears to 
be the same with frogs. In the course of a solitary walle in the 
beginning of last March, my attention was excited by an uncom- 
mon commotion in a shallow pool of water not much more than 
four feet square. My approach to ascertain the cause being rather 
too hasty, I had only time to observe it was occasioned by a parcel 
of frogs, when immediately on my advance they disappeared under 
3 
