48 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 



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is notorious to everybody : because we see them sticking 

 upon each other's backs for a month together in the spring : 

 and yet I never saw, or read of toads being observed in the 

 same situation. It is strange that the matter with regard 

 to the venom of toads has not been yet settled. That they 

 are not noxious to some animals is plain : for ducks, 

 buzzards, owls, stone-curlews, and snakes eat them, to ray 

 knowledge, with impunity. And I well remember the time, 

 but was not eyewdtness to the fact (though numbers of 

 persons were), when a quack, at this village, ate a toad to 

 make the country people stare ; afterwards he drank oil. 



I have been informed also, from undoubted authority^ 

 that some ladies (ladies, you will say, of peculiar taste) took 

 a fancy to a toad, which they nourished summer after 

 summer, for many years, till he grew to a monstrous size, 

 with the maggots which turn to flesh-flies. The reptile 

 used to come forth every evening from a hole under the 

 garden-steps ; and was taken up, after supper, on the table 

 to be fed. But at last a tame raven, kenning him as he 

 put forth his head, gave him such a severe stroke with his 

 horny beak as put out one eye. After this accident the 

 creature languished for some time and died. 



I need not remind a gentleman of your extensive reading 

 of the excellent account there is from Mr. Derham, in Ray's 

 Wisdom of God in the Creation (p. 365), concerning the 

 migration of frogs from their breeding ponds. In this 

 account he at once subverts that foolish opinion of their 

 dropping from the clouds in rain ; showing that it is from 

 the grateful coolness and moisture of those showers that 

 they are tempted to set out on their travels, which they 

 defer till those fall. Frogs are as yet in their tadpole state ; 

 but, in a few weeks, our lanes, paths, fields, will swarm for 

 a few days with myriads of those emigrants, no larger than 



