OF SELBORNE 45 



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 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 

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

 words. Speaking of the opercula or covering to the gills 

 of the mud inguana, he proceeds to say that " The forms 

 of these pennated coverings approach 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 state, 

 and become land animals, as I have observed, by keeping 

 them alive for some time myself." 



Linnaeus, in his Systema Naturae, hints at what Mr. 

 Ellis advances more than once. 



Providence has been so indulgent to us as to allow of 

 but one venomous reptile of the serpent kind in these 

 kingdoms, and that is the viper. As you propose the 

 good of mankind to be an object of your publications, you 

 will not omit to mention common salad-oil as a sovereign 

 remedy against the bite of the viper. As to the blind 

 worm (anguis fragilis, so called because it snaps in sunder 

 with a small blow), I have found, on examination, that it is 

 perfectly innocuous. A neighbouring yeoman (to whom I 

 am indebted for some good hints) killed and opened a 

 female viper about the twenty-seventh of May : he found 

 her filled with a chain of eleven eggs, about the size of 

 those of a blackbird ; but none of them were advanced so 

 far towards a state of maturity as to contain any rudiments 

 of young. Though they are oviparous, yet they are 

 viviparous also, hatching their young within their bellies, 



