OF 8ELBORNE. 63 



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 

 my little finger nail. Swammerdam gives a most accurate 

 account of the method and situation in which the male im- 

 pregnates 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 off as useless, 

 and the animal betakes itself to the land I 1 



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 the 5th, 1766, in his account of the mud inguana, 

 an amphibious bipes from South Carolina, that the water-eft, 



1 Mr. Bell has pointed out that the whole of the typical Batrachia, 

 the frogs, toads, newts, salamanders, &c. undergo a complete metamor- 

 phosis. In the land species, v. hich from their habits have no constant 

 access to water, the aquatic portion of their existence, during which the 

 gills remain attached, cannot be passed in that medium in the same 

 manner as the frogs, &c. They undergo the metamorphosis therefore in 

 tbe oviduct, before they are excluded from the mother, and come forth 

 in the perfect condition. But in the other forms, the change takes 

 place in the water, and the young live there for a time in a fish-like 

 state, as regards not only their respiration, but most of the other 

 functions of life. ED. 



