140 NATURE-STUDY REVIEW [15:4— Apr., 1919 



Here at last, after a varied career, after many dangers escaped, 

 Red-spot has reached the goal of his efforts and no longer can it be 

 said, "when you grow bigger you can do thus or so." His airs and 

 manners are quite laughable, but he manages to make friends with 

 a number of gay young Red-spots of about his own age. He is 

 especially pleased, by one very pretty little friend. She is smaller 

 than he, her coloring is a little less striking, and altogether she is 

 more dainty in her general make up and way. 



Do you suppose he sings to her as do the frogs, his cousins? He 

 can cry out faintly with pain, but if he sings for joy our ears are not 

 tuned to hear. Perhaps hers are, for he grows very confidential, 

 and might tell her of many things that would be of intense interest 

 to her; of his hopes, his fears, and his adventures in life, of his 

 famous hunts for angle-worms that crawl, insects that swim in air, 

 and spiders that live in gauze houses. 



One long story he might have told her, and probably did, was the 

 result of an angle-worm hunt. This is the way it runs, "I was 

 caught and forcibly detained in a great glass prison for days and 

 days, then I was peered at and poked, turned over and stared out of 

 countenance till I thought I should die. Staring great eyed crea- 

 tures went about on two legs and looked at me with curious instru- 

 ments made of brass and glass which they held in their front paws. 

 Every time one of them came near me I tried to make believe I was 

 dead. But that was of no use ; they seemed to know better. At 

 last, after many failures, by a desperate and heroic effort I scaled 

 the wall of my prison, reached a safe place, and at night stole away. 

 Never again will I be caught that way by creatures who look at me 

 just to see what I am like, even if they do not actually hurt me." 



This is the way he closes his story. "One thing makes me glad 

 that I endured all those terrible hardships, for in that prison I heard 

 the whole history of our race and now understand many things that 

 were a puzzle to me before. All over the eastern United States in 

 ponds and pools and lakes and bogs are Red-spots as like to us as 

 pins on a paper. We are genuine American blue-bloods, sala- 

 manders of stock as ancient as the red Indian. Of course we have 

 connections in Europe and Asia, and I fear from what I heard, that 

 we shall be obliged to recognize the claims of the frogs and toads to 

 distant relationship. The history of our special line has been 

 studied by wise people for over seventy years, and after calling us 

 all the names they could devise, it has been settled that to our 



