76 The Natural History of Selborne 



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 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 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 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 state and become land 



1 Or, rather, is absorbed. ED. 



