XVII.] OF SELBORNE. 55 



monstrous size. The reptile used to come forth every evening 

 from a hole under the garden steps ; and was taken up on the 

 table to be fed after supper. But at last a tame raven, kenning 

 him as he put forth his head, gave him such a severe stroke with 

 his horny beak as put out one eye. After this accident the 

 creature languished for some time and died. 



I need not remind a gentleman of your extensive reading 

 of the excellent account there is from Mr. Derham, in Eay's 

 " Wisdom of God in the Creation," concerning the migration of 

 frogs from their breeding ponds. In this account he at once 

 subverts that foolish opinion of their dropping from the clouds 

 in rain ; showing that it is from the grateful coolness and 

 moisture of those showers that they are tempted to set out on 

 their travels, which they defer till those fall. Frogs are as yet 

 in their tadpole state ; but in a few weeks our lanes, paths, 

 fields, will swarm for a few days with myriads of those emi- 

 grants, no larger than my little-finger nail. Swammerdam gives 

 a most accurate account of the method and situation in which 

 the male impregnates the spawn of the female. How wonderful 

 is the economy of Providence with regard to the limbs of so 

 vile a reptile ! While it is an aquatic, or in a tadpole state, it 

 has a fish-like tail, and no legs : as soon as the legs sprout, 

 the tail drops off as iiseless, and the animal betakes itself to 

 the land. 1 



Merrit, I trust, is widely mistaken when he advances that 

 the Rana arborea is an English reptile ; it abounds in Germany 

 and Switzerland. 



It is to be remembered that the Salamandra aynatica of Bay 

 (the water-newt, or eft) will frequently bite at the angler's bait, 

 and is often caught on his hook. I used to take it for granted 

 that the Salamandra nquatica was hatched, lived, and died, in 

 the water. But John Ellis, Esq., F.E.S. (the coralline Ellis), 

 assorts, in a letter to the Eoyal Society, dated June 5th, 17C6, 

 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 

 of misunderstanding his meaning, I shall give it iu his own 

 1 The tail of the tadpole does not drop off ; it is absorbed. 



