FROGS, TOADS AND SOME GRAY-HAIRED LIES 435 



Early in 1862 a man claimed that six hundred 

 feet under ground in a nine-inch bed of coal he 

 found a live frog. The frog was probably there 

 and got there the same way as did the man. In 

 1731 a toad was found in a heart of an oak tree 

 near Natz. Some cheerful story tellers about forty 

 years ago claimed that while working on the Hat- 

 tlepool waterworks, they found a toad embedded 

 in a solid block of limestone. "The toad's eyes 

 shone with unusual brilliancy," as well they might. 

 The creature continued for some time in the pos- 

 session of Mr. Spence Horner, President of the 

 Natural History Society, but I find no record of 

 Mr. Spence Horner's vouching for this story. 



Nevertheless, people will go on believing in these 

 wonderful toad stories for hundreds of years to 

 come. The great and learned Pliny was as credu- 

 lous as is a small boy of today, and some of his 

 nature fake stories have gone down through the 

 centuries and are still accepted as truth by many 

 people, yet any one can by experiment, prove the 

 fallacy of these stories. Over a century ago mem- 

 bers of the French Academy by experiments proved 

 that neither frogs nor toads could live in air-tight 

 enclosures. Miline Edwards, early in the nine- 

 teenth century enclosed some frogs in air-tight ves- 

 sels. The frogs, of course, turned up their feet 

 and died. A certain Dr. McCartney put a toad in 

 a vessel and covered it with a piece of slate and 

 buried it in the ground, but the slate admitted both 

 air and moisture, and at the end of two weeks the 



