COMMON TOAD. 169 



when the great impulse took possession of the Toads, we used 

 to see scores of them hopping across a well-used road that 

 divided the grass-lands, and next morning would see the lifeless 

 bodies of many that had been flattened out by motor-wheels in 

 the dark. On the further side of the pond the continuity of the 

 grass-land was again broken by a railway line, and here you 

 would see them hopping across the track and climbing over the 

 rails, many, of course, meeting fate in the adventure. 



In our present neighbourhood there is a large pond fed by 

 springs from the plateau gravels of an extensive common. In 

 the days of our boyhood there was open grassland and copse 

 between the common and the pond with only an ordinary hedge 

 to mark that it was private land. At the present time the pond 

 forms a fine piece of ornamental water in a private garden, and 

 on all sides residental roads surround it. Yet this pond must 

 have been a Toads 7 breeding place in the old days, for in the 

 spring we find Toads on the tarred sidewalks of the roads 

 seeking for gaps in the fence through which they may reach the 

 desired trysting place ; and we have sometimes put them in 

 the way of finding it. It is very probable that in such cases the 

 Toads are making their way back to the identical pond in which 

 they first saw the light a corollary to the case of the migrant 

 birds that find their way back to build their nests in the copse 

 or hedgerow where they were hatched. 



The small, black eggs of the Toad differ from those of the 

 Frogs in the fact that they form a double row embedded in a 

 gelatinous string ten to fifteen feet in length. Like those of 

 the Frog the eggs by imbibing water swell to three times their 

 original size. The strings are wound about the stems of water, 

 weeds by the movements of their parents, and the little black 

 larvae are hatched out in about a fortnight. For the first few 

 days they cling to the egg-strings, then hang tails downwards 

 from the undersides of leaves. They go through similar stages 

 to those of the Frog tadpole, and become small tailless Toads, 



