NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 49 



my little finger nail. Swaramerdam gives a most accurate 

 account of the method and situation in which the male 

 impregnates the spawn of the female. How wonderful is 

 the economy of Providence with regard to the limbs of sO 

 vile a reptile ! While it is an aquatic it has a fish-like tail, 

 and no legs ; as soon as the legs sprout, the tail drops ofi" 

 as useless, and the animal betakes itself to the land ! 



Merret, I trust, is widely mistaken when he advances 

 that the Rana arborea is an English reptile ; it abounds in 

 Germany and Switzerland. 



It is to be remembered that the Salamandra aquatica 

 of Ray (the water-newt or eft) will frequently bite at the 

 angler's bait, and is often caught on his hook. I used to 

 take it for granted that the Salamandra aquatica was 

 hatched, lived, and died in the water. But John Ellis, 

 Esq., F.R.S. (the coralline Ellis), asserts, in a letter to the 

 Royal Society, dated June 5th, 1766, in his account of the 

 Mud inguana, an amphibious bipes from South Carolina, 

 that the water-eft, or newt, is only the larva of the land-eft, 

 as tadpoles are of frogs. Lest I should be suspected to 

 misunderstand his meaning, I shall give it in his own 

 words. Speaking of the opercula or coverings to the gills 

 of the Mud inguana, he proceeds to say that " the form of 

 these pennated coverings approaches very near to what I 

 have some time ago observed in the larva or aquatic state 

 of our English Lacerta^ known by the name of eft, or newt ; 

 which serve them for coverings to their gills, and for fins to 

 swim with while in this state ; and which they lose, as well 

 as the fins of their tails, when they change their state and 

 become land animals, as I have observed, by keeping them 

 alive for some time myself." 



Linnaeus, in his Systema Naiurce^ hints at what Mr. Ellis 

 advances more than once. 



295 



