7 6 'The Natural History of Se I borne 



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 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 : so soon as the legs sprout, 

 the tail drops off 1 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 Germany 

 and Switzerland. 



It is to be remembered that the Salamandra aquatica 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 

 the 5th, 1766, in his account of the mud inguana, an amphi- 

 bious 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 to misunderstand his meaning, 

 I shall give it in his own words. Speaking of the opercula or 

 coverings to the gills of the mud inguana, he proceeds to say 

 that, " The form of these pennated coverings approaches very 

 near to what I have some time ago observed in the larva or 

 aquatic state of our English lacerta, known by the name of 

 eft, or newt; which serve them for coverings to their gills, 

 and for fins to swim with while in this state; and which they 

 lose, as well as the fins of their tails, when they change their 



1 Or, rather, is absorbed. ED. 



