1 86 A GARDEN DIARY 



who, in the year 1705, turned out a handful of 

 spawn into a ditch near Trinity College. For 

 some years the frogs appear to have contented 

 themselves with the neighbourhood of that 

 University, but sixteen years later, in 1721, they 

 were found forty miles away, from which point 

 they seem to have rapidly extended themselves 

 over the whole island. Incidentally the fact is 

 confirmed by a great, if hardly a zoological 

 authority, namely, Dean Swift. In his Con- 

 siderations about Maintaining the Poor, which 

 appeared in the year 1726, in the course of 

 thundering against certain fire offices, which had 

 the impertinence to be English, he declares that 

 " their marks upon our houses spread faster and 

 further than a colony of frogs." The portent, 

 therefore, it is plain, had reached his ears. 



Coincidences are attractive things, and it is 

 satisfactory to discover that as regards earlier 

 times we are again able to fortify our mere lay 

 zoology upon the authority of an eminent eccle- 

 siastic. This time it was St. Donatus, bishop of 

 Etruria, who, writing in the ninth century, assured 

 the world, upon his episcopal authority, that no 

 frogs or toads existed, or, moreover, could exist 

 in Ireland. Three centuries later Giraldus 

 Cambrensis tells us, however, that in his time 

 a frog was taken alive near Waterford, and 

 brought into court, Robert de la Poer being 

 then warden. " Whereat," he says, " Duvenold, 



