SEVEN- YE AE SLEEPEKS 73 



to have been found, before the toad himself was actually 

 extracted ? Did you examine it all round to make quite sure 

 there was no hole, or crack, or passage in it anywhere ? 

 Did you satisfy yourself after the toad was released from 

 his close quarters that no such hole, or crack, or passage 

 had been dexterously closed up, with intent to deceive, by 

 plaster, cement, or other artificial composition ? Did you 

 ever offer the workmen who found it a nominal reward 

 say five shillings for the first perfectly unanswerable 

 specimen of a genuine unadulterated antediluvian toad ? 

 Have you got the toad now present, and can you produce 

 him here in court (on writ of habeas corpus or otherwise), 

 together with all the fragments of the stone or tree from 

 which he was extracted ? These are the disagreeable, 

 prying, inquisitorial, I may even say insulting, questions 

 with which a modern man of science is ready to assail the 

 truthful and reputable gentlemen who venture to assert 

 their discovery, in these degenerate days, of the ancient 

 and unsophisticated toad-in-a-hole. 



Now, the worst of it is that the gentlemen in question, 

 being unfamiliar with what is technically described as 

 scientific methods of investigation, are very apt to lose their 

 temper when thus cross-questioned, and to reply, after the 

 fashion usually attributed to the female mind, with another 

 question, whether the scientific person wishes to accuse 

 them of downright lying. And as nothing on earth could 

 be further from the scientific person's mind than such an 

 imputation, he is usually fain in the end to give up the 

 social pursuit of postprandial natural history (the subject 

 generally crops up about the same time as the after-dinner 

 coffee), and to let the prehistoric toad go on his own 

 triumphant way, unheeded. 



As a matter of fact, nobody ever makes larger allow- 

 ances for other people, in the estimate of their veracity, 



