9 2 The Poets and Nature. 



"that loathed invasion," as Milton calls it which "the 

 river brought forth abundantly." 



1 ' A race obscene 



Spawned in the muddy beds of Nile, 

 Polluting Egypt. Gardens, fields, and plains 

 Were covered with the pest. The trees were filled, 

 The croaking nuisance lurked in every nook ; 

 Nor palaces, nor even chambers 'scaped ; 

 And the land stank, so numerous was the fry." Cowper. 



With this point of high prescription, sanctified by a 

 supreme authority, the poets are accurately well content, and 

 the frog remains therefore "loathsome." "Puffing" frog, 

 " dew-sipping," " sly-jumping," are found among the more 

 curious epithets applied to the animal. But "speckled," 

 "hoarse," and "slimy" are the more common. 



Yet if more poets had been familiar with zoology they 

 might have fairly revelled in the beauties and significances 

 of the frog-world. Of the strange chain of metamorphoses 

 by which the c; porwigle " laboriously graduates in maturity 

 I have already spoken, but what shall we say of the Pipa 

 that hatches her young out of dimples upon her back? 

 She has, as it were, a false skin, and under this are little 

 pits, in each of which an egg germinates. By-and-by they 

 hatch. The young ones creep out through the upper skin 

 on to the mother's back, and hop off to the ground. She 

 then casts her old skin and starts afresh. Or of the Alyatis, 

 where the husbands share with their wives in a fair and 

 manly way the inconveniences of reproduction, and "lie 

 in," so to speak, of one half the eggs while the mother takes 

 charge of the other half? Or of that Hyla whose eggs the 

 male takes up in its paws and packs away comfortably into 

 a pouch on the mother's back, where they hatch ? 



Were the responsibilities of parents ever more conscien- 

 tiously undertaken? Then, too, the originality of such 

 proceedings ! The poor things have got neither " dens " nor 

 " nests," and they refuse to leave their eggs lying about, as 



