THE VOICE OF THE DESERT 3Q 



been left to his own devices, he v^ould have spent the 

 months until the next July. The ancient belief that many 

 lowly creatm'es were simply born every year out of the 

 mud would seem, on the face of things, to get its strongest 

 support right here. 



Those ^vriters of textbooks and manuals who are com- 

 pelled to say something about Scaphiopus couchii seem 

 agreed that he must spend the major part of his time 

 buried somewhere in the earth. But where, under what 

 conditions, and doing what (if anything) nobody knows. 

 Aheady, however, I think I am beginning to hav6 evidence 

 which permits certain presumptions. Perhaps if I get more 

 I shall some day return to the subject. But I introduce him 

 now for a different reason, which is this: Without know- 

 ing any more than I aheady do, it is clear enough that the 

 spadefoot represents, in a very extreme form, one of the 

 ways of living in the desert — namely by lying low most of 

 the time. 



Many plants do the same. They exist only as seeds dur- 

 ing all but about six weeks out of the fifty-two. And though 

 it seems less extraordinary for a plant to do this than it 

 does for an animal to remain buried for an even greater 

 proportion of the time, the analogy is obvious and will re- 

 main so, even if it should turn out that the spadefpot's 

 inactivity is not so nearly absolute as has sometimes been 

 assumed. 



Now one might object that in the case of this toad what 

 we have is not really an example of how to live in the 

 desert, but merely of how to sm*vive there by surrender- 

 ing ninety-nine hundredths of one's supposed right to hve. 

 It might seem to give the lie to my rash contention that 



