132 EDGE OF THE JUNGLE 
black wrigglers filling puddles and swamps of 
our northern country. These were slow-moving, 
graceful creatures, partly transparent, partly re- 
flecting every hue of the spectrum, with broad, 
waving scarlet and hyaline fins, and strange, 
fish-like mouths and eyes. Their habits were as 
unpollywoglike as their appearance. I visited 
their micaceous pool again and again; and if I 
could have spent days instead of hours with them, 
no moment of ennui would have intervened. 
My acquaintanceship with tadpoles in the past 
had not aroused me to enthusiasm in the matter 
of their mental ability; as, for example, the in< 
mates of the next aquarium to that of the Red- 
fins, where I kept a herd or brood or school of 
Short-tailed Blacks—pollywogs of the Giant 
Toad (Bufo marinus). At earliest dawn they, 
swam aimlessly about and mumbled; at high noon 
they mumbled and still swam; at midnight they, 
refused to be otherwise occupied. It was possible 
to alarm them; but even while they fled they 
mumbled. 
In bodily form my Redfins were fish, but men- 
tally they had advanced a little beyond the usual 
tadpole train of reactions, reaching forward to- 
ward the varied activities of the future amphi- 
