144 A PHILOSOPHER WITH NATURE 



in woods and marshes there are pieces of water in the 

 country which at this season have been trysting- 

 places of frogs for hundreds, and it may be for 

 thousands, of generations. From far and near the 

 frogs in early spring move towards these spots by 

 unerring instinct. The surface of the water may 

 sometimes be seen broken and rippled, as if a shoal 

 of mackerel were underneath. The writer recently 

 saw such a meeting-place where the frogs thus 

 collected must have numbered thousands, and the 

 croaking, splashing, and gurgling of the creatures 

 blended together into a curious body of sound which 

 was audible a long distance away. 



Strange as it may seem, there is a certain fascina- 

 tion in the frog as a tame creature. There is 

 probably no other animal which has been so much 

 studied and experimented on by science as the 

 common frog. Yet it is surprising how httle we 

 know about the personal side of him. Taken yoimg 

 in the spawn stage, he develops into a tadpole 

 through a series of imcanny metamorphoses which, 

 while they certainly suggest as seen under the 

 microscope strange scenes and climates in the past 

 history of the world, do not lend themselves much 

 to a study of his elusive personality. It is only 

 when the creature absorbs his tadpole's tail (it does 

 not drop off) and emerges from the water a httle 

 frog about the size of a sixpence that his true 

 personality can be said to begin. The writer has 

 kept many little frogs from this stage upwards. They 

 soon begin to take an interest in their surroundings 

 and to show intelligence in their habits. They wiU 

 readily feed on small grubs, worms, and insects. 

 The frog is peculiar in one respect about his food. 



