1936 The Zoologist — December, 1869. 



jections increase in size, their appendages appear in due course, and 

 eventually the hip and shoulder bones are developed. As soon as 

 these locomotive organs enter upon the discharge of their functions, 

 tlie tail begins to disappear. Its skin, muscles, nerves, bones and 

 blood-vessels atrophy and vanish from our sight : they have not 

 faded away, they have not simply fallen off, they have not been cast 

 off by a species of moulting, as in the case of insect larvae ; they 

 have been got rid of by none of these methods; their substance has 

 been reabsorbed atom by atom ; and hence, although it has ceased to 

 exist, it is not the less alive on that account. We see, then, that frogs 

 undergo complete metamorphoses not only in regard to their entire 

 organism, but as to each set of apparatus, with the exception of the 

 nervous system." 



Clear and precise as is this account of the metamorphosis of frogs, 

 there are not wanting naturalists who maintain that although the 

 metamorphosis I have described is usual, yet that it is not necessary. 

 In the April number of the 'Annals and Magazine of Natural History' 

 for the year 1853, a Mr. Edward Joseph Lowe, F.G.S., &c., published 

 a paper ' On the reproduction of frogs and toads without the inter- 

 mediate stage of tadpole ' : it is a paper of great interest, and is not 

 altogether unsupported by the previous observations of naturalists. 

 Mr. Lowe fortifies his position by stating that young frogs have been 

 dug out of the ground in the month of January: he writes thus: — 

 " In digging in the garden amongst the strawberry-beds in the middle 

 of January, a nest of young frogs was uptinned : these were apparently 

 three or four weeks old. This ground had been previously dug in the 

 month of August, and many strawberry plants buried ; it was auion},'St 

 these plants in a state of partial decomposition, that these young ones 

 were observed." I may remark that the statement scarcely establishes 

 the author's idea that frogs may be matured without passing through 

 the tadpole state, for it is quite as likely that a frog which had 

 passed through the tadpole state as one which had not, should 

 occur in the situation described. Mr. Lowe goes on to state that 

 frogs are bred in cellars where there is no water for tadpoles, and 

 continues thus : — " In mentioning this subject to Mr. Sidebotham, of 

 Manchester, he informed me that young frogs, and in fact frogs of all 

 sizes, were to be seen in his cellar amongst decaying dahlia-tubers : 

 the smallest of thera were only about half the size of the young frog 

 when newly developed from the tadpole. He further stated that there 



