A BARKING TOAD 



better be kept for the common toad and its immediate 

 allies, and the rest of the Anurous Amphibians, or 

 Batrachia, as their technical name goes, be called frogs. 

 The Ceratophrys derives its name from the horn which 

 in most of them surmounts the upper eyelid and adds 

 to the fierceness of their aspect. The size of its mouth 

 is exaggeratedly amphibian ; and well it may be, for 

 the beast is extremely partial to its own kind and even 

 to its own species. It will gulp down quite a large frog 

 without winking, or rather, to be more accurate, with 

 that slow closure of the eye which is a necessary con- 

 sequence of the structure of its throat and head. As 

 the Ceratophrys is, as a rule and when undisturbed, toad- 

 like in its equanimity, it is well for it that its hues assim- 

 ilate so conveniently to the hues of a marshy environ- 

 ment. Squatting down at rest in a shallow depression 

 which conceals its " inglorious belly," the mottled green 

 and brown of the back suggests a lump of earth partly 

 overgrown with Confervae. Thus the frog has only to 

 sit tight and the revolving hours must bring within its 

 unerring grasp some wandering insect or reptile. These 

 are seized and bitten with a very sharp and strong 

 dental apparatus at the front of the mouth, which 

 can also inflict a painful bite upon the human subject. 

 The Ceratophrys is at times a peculiarly irritable 

 amphibian. If handled disrespectfully it puffs itself 

 out vastly, then gives vent to a sound not by any means 

 unlike a sharp bark. That bark is not worse than its 

 bite by any means ; it is indeed the prelude to a forward 

 jump combined with a snap. To outward appearance 

 this frog is not widely different from other frogs. It is 

 perhaps a little more apoplectic in its contours. Head 

 merges into trunk with even less suggestion of a neck 

 than in others of its race. Internally some of the species, 

 including Ceratophrys ornata, present us with an inter- 

 esting survival from past times, as we perhaps assume 



286 



