l62 ANIMAL LIFE OF THE BRITISH ISLES. 



of this sudden appearance they term it a phenomenon than 

 the naturalist's statement that the Frogs had been waiting 

 in the pond for the psychical moment to arrive for their dis- 

 persion the time when the reeking herbage of many acres 

 around would offer the safest conditions for their tender bodies 

 to embark on the great adventure of life, their distribution over 

 wide areas where they could carry out their proper function, the 

 control of any inordinate increase in the insect population. 

 For months they will crawl and hop invisibly among the lush 

 grass and journey through the dense herbage of hedge-bottoms 

 and spinneys. Some will come under fences even into our 

 gardens, to help us in an unequal warfare in which the gardener 

 is always defeated by the insect, whether the bigger combatant 

 admits it or not. Their food consists entirely of insects, slugs, 

 and worms. In turn the Frog constitutes the food of many 

 larger animals, including fishes, birds, snakes and weasels. 

 The winter is spent embedded in mud at the pond-bottom, or in 

 damp holes in the earth. 



The Common Frog is distributed widely all over Britain, but 

 is only of local occurrence in Ireland. Abroad it ranges over 

 Central and Northern Europe as far as Sweden and Norway, 

 and eastward to Mid-Asia. 



Edible Frog (Rana escuknta, Linn.). 



Although the Common Frog is the only species that is really 

 native in Britain, another one the Edible Frog, a Continental 

 species has been naturalised in the Eastern Counties of 

 England since the early part of the nineteenth century, when 

 Mr. Geo. Berney brought about 1500 specimens from France 

 and Belgium and turned them loose in the Fens, in the neigh- 

 bourhood of Stoke Ferry, where they are no longer plentiful, 

 though they occur locally in various parts of Norfolk. A few 

 years later (1843) Mr. Thurnall discovered the species in the 



