The Vitality of Toads enclosed in Stone and Wood. 275 



in the cell No. 9, where the glass cover remained entire, and where 

 it appears certain, from the increased weight of the enclosed animal, 

 that insects must have found admission, we have an example of these 

 minute animals finding their way into a cell, to which great care had 

 been taken to prevent any possibility of access. 



Admitting, then, that toads are occasionally found in cavities of 

 wood and stone, with which there is no communication sufficiently 

 large to allow the ingress and egress of the animal enclosed in them, 

 we may, I think, find a solution of such phenomena in the habits of 

 these reptiles, and of the insects which form their food. The first 

 effort of the young toad, as soon as it has left its tadpole state and 

 emerged from the water, is to seek shelter in holes and crevices of 

 rocks and trees. An individual, which, when young, may have thus 

 entered a cavity by some very narrow aperture, would find abundance 

 of food by catching insects, which like itself seek shelter within such 

 cavities, and may soon have increased so much in bulk as to render 

 it impossible to go out again, through the narrow aperture at which 

 it entered. A small hole of this kind is very likely to be overlooked 

 by common workmen, who are the only people whose operations on 

 stone and wood disclose cavities in the interior of such substances. 

 In the case of toads, snakes, and lizards, that occasionally issue from 

 stones that are broken in a quarry, or in sinking wells, and some- 

 times even from strata of coal at the bottom of a coal mine, the evi- 

 dence is never perfect to shew that the reptiles were entirely enclos- 

 ed in a solid rock ; no examination is ever made until the reptile is 

 first discovered by the breaking of the mass in which it was contain- 

 ed, and then it is too late to ascertain without carefully replacing 

 every fragment (and in no case that I have seen reported has this 

 ever been done) whether or not there was any hole or crevice by 

 which the animal may have entered the cavity from which it was ex- 

 tracted. Without previous examination it is almost impossible to 

 prove that there was no such communication. In the case of rocks 

 near the surface of the earth, and in stone quarries, reptiles find 

 ready admission to holes and fissures. We have a notorious example 

 of this kind in the lizard found in a chalk pit, and brought alive to the 

 late Dr. Clarke. In the case also of wells and coal pits, a reptile 

 that had fallen down the well or shaft, and survived its fall, would 

 seek its natural retreat in the first hole or crevice it could find, and 

 the miner dislodging it from this cavity to which his previous attention 

 had not been called, might in ignorance conclude diat the animal was 

 coeval with the stone from which he had extracted it. 



