38 THE BIOLOGY OF THE SEASONS 



accomplished and the frogling hops ashore, the muscles 

 of the tongue are at length strong enough to shoot out the 

 tongue on the day-dreaming fly. The peculiar interest of 

 this is that Amphibians were the first animals to have a 

 movable tongue, that of fishes being even worse than 

 flabby, entirely non-muscular. 



It is very interesting to consider in the same way the 

 other momentous acquisitions made by the race of Amphib- 

 ians such as fingers and toes, and the power of gripping 

 things, vocal cords, and the power of speech though 

 how much they have to say in their extraordinary jabber 

 no one knows. 



Another interesting consideration is the variety of 

 solutions that this one animal, the frog, offers to the 

 problems of its life. Even in mathematics, we believe, 

 there may be more than one solution to a problem, and 

 every one knows that this is true of the practical problems 

 of human life. There is considerable variety in the 

 solutions of the problems of Brodwissenscha/t, though in 

 strictness, we suppose, the fact of the matter is that the 

 conditions of the typical problems are diverse, and there- 

 fore the solutions are diverse. But our point is this, that, 

 to the two great problems of nutrition and respiration (if 

 they are really two, for is not oxygen a kind of food ?), 

 the frog offers in the course of its life-history an unusual 

 diversity of answer. 



It will feed on its legacy of yolk, on unicellular Algae, 

 on the epidermis of aquatic plants, on the vegetable debris 

 in the water, on animal matter by the way, on its own 

 tail (of course in a sort of surreptitious phagocytic fashion), 

 on its own brethren, on dead things in the water (tadpoles 

 clean delicate skeletons beautifully), and, by and by, when 

 it comes to its own, after a remarkable gustatory curric- 

 ulum, it will feed on living insects and little else. Yet 



