202 OBSERVATIONS ON REPTILES. 



the breeding season was over; their disappearance 

 seeming as mysterious as their appearance in the 

 first instance. Why should the coming of the young 

 broods on land, after quitting the tadpole state, be so 

 generally obvious, and not that of their parents at 

 the expiration of the breeding season ? It is pro- 

 bably not so much due to the superior numbers of 

 the former, as to the movement being on their part a 

 more simultaneous one ; and the old toads, at what- 

 ever season they take to, or quit, the water, must 

 make the passage, I conceive, at different times, or 

 only a few together, and not in large parties, thus to 

 escape observation. 



What has also always very much struck me is 

 the great seeming disproportion between the num- 

 bers of toads we observe in stagnant waters during the 

 spring, and the scattered few that are to be found on 

 land at other periods of the year. Here and there 

 one is turned up, or is seen slowly making its way 

 across our garden paths on a summer's evening; but 

 we hardly find them in such plenty as would lead us 

 to suspect the existence of so many in the immediate 

 neighbourhood, as are required to stock our ponds at 

 the above season in the way alluded to. We may 

 infer from this how much there is of life and enjoy- 

 ment going on about us that we know nothing of : 

 how, among the lower animals, species may abound 

 in certain localities to a degree that the naturalist 

 himself is hardly aware of, from not being sufficiently 

 acquainted with their exact haunts.* 



* Instances of this kind, among insects, will be familiar to 

 every entomologist; and nothing more strikingly illustrates the 



