44 WHITE 



taken up, after supper, on the table to be fed. 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 Ray's 

 "Wisdom of God in the Creation" (p. 365), 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 cool- 

 ness 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 

 emigrants, 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 it has a fish- 

 like tail, and no legs ; as soon as the legs sprout, the tail drops 

 off as useless, and the animal betakes itself to the land ! 



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

 the Rana arborea is an English reptile ; it abounds in Ger- 

 many and Switzerland. 3 



It is to be remembered that the Salamandra aqttatica of Ray 

 (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 aquatica was hatched, lived, and died in 

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

 asserts, in a letter to the Royal Society, dated June 5th, 1766, 

 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. 4 Lest I should be 

 suspected to misunderstand his meaning, I shall give it in his 

 own words. Speaking of the opercula or coverings to the gills 

 of the mudinguana> he proceeds to say that, "the form of these 

 pennated coverings approaches very near to what I have some 

 time ago observed in the lava or aquatic state of our English 



