EIGHTH DAY.] NATURAL HISTORY. 205 



almost a general view of natural history. You know 

 that frogs, crawfish, snails, earthworms, spiders, 

 larvse of every kind, millipedes, beetles, squillse, 

 moths, water flies, and land flies, are all eaten by 

 trout; and I once heard the late Sir Joseph Banks 

 say, that he found a large toad stuck in the throat of 

 a trout ; but as the skin of this animal is furnished 

 with an exceedingly acrid secretion, it probably had 

 been disgorged after being swallowed by a fish 

 exceedingly hungry.* But though I have found 

 most of the insect tribes, and many small fishes even 

 of the most ravenous kind, as pike, in the stomachs 

 of trout, it never happened to me to see a toad there. 

 I might give you an account of the birth and life of 

 frogs, which, with respect to their generation, 

 resemble fish, and which, when first excluded from 

 the egg, may be considered in the tadpole state as 

 fish ; and you would not find their singular 

 metamorphosis without interest. Or I could detail 

 to you the true histories which naturalists have given 



* [Or, perhaps, by a fish of a breed that had no experience of the 

 poisonous qualities of the toad ; not an improbable circumstance, 

 considering that the toad is rarely found, and never except by accident, 

 in the clear brisk streams, the favourite haunts of the trout. When 

 the toad was first introduced into Barbados, only about twenty years 

 ago, dogs, to their cost, made them their prey, some dying it is said, 

 and some becoming mad from the effects of the poison ; now taught 

 by experience, they as carefully avoid them there, as they do in this 

 country. J.D.] 



