THE NATURAL 



the pads which surround the cloaca, sketch of an appara- 

 tus which has remained extremely rudimentary, or pos- 

 sibly problematic. With anours, the male, smaller than 

 the female, climbs on her back, passes his forefeet, his 

 arms, under her armpits and remains skin to skin for a 

 month, for two months. At the end of this time the 

 pressed flanks of the female finally let fall the eggs, and 

 he fecundates them as they fall. Such is the coupling of 

 frogs, lasting from fifteen to twenty days. The male 

 clambers onto the female, encircles her with his arms, 

 crosses his hands over her breast, and holds her tightly 

 embraced. He then remains immobile, in an ecstatic 

 state, insensible to every external shock, to every wound. 

 It would seem that the sole aim of this enlacing is to 

 exercise a pressure on, or to cause an excitement in, the 

 belly of the female and to make her deliver her eggs. 

 She lays a thousand and the male sprays them with sperm 

 as they pass. 



All the anours (tailless batrachians) thus press their 

 females like lemons; but the method of fecundating the 

 eggs is quite variable. The mid-wife toad enlaced like 

 the others, aids the emergence of the egg garland with 

 his hind feet, he unrolls it grain by grain, with devotion, 

 while the female, immobile emptier, lends herself willingly 

 to this manoeuvre, which she feels perhaps as a caress. 

 The aquatic toad does not pull at the garland, he receives 

 it in his paws, and when he has ten eggs or so, he sprinkles 

 them, ejaculating with a movement of the flanks, which 

 old Roesel * compares to that of a dog's in coition. As 

 for the common land toad, whose note sounds like a 



*In bis "Historia Naturalis Ranarum," 1758, Bufo aquaticus. 

 ICO 



