52 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 



Merret, I trust, is widely mistaken when he advances that the 

 Ran a 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 





WATER-NEWTS. 



meaning, I shall give it in his own words. Speaking of the oper- 

 cula or coverings to the gills of the mud inguana t he proceeds to 

 say that, " The form 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 seroent kind in these kingdoms, and that is 



