i8o REPTILES AND AMPHIBIA 



the Kohu-Kohu side in the following year. They are not very 

 numerous in the district at the present time (1916), but at Kaikohe 

 they are extremely common. 



The remarkable power of vitality possessed by the green frog — 

 Hyla aurea — is shown by the following. In December, 1884, my 

 wife and I left Dunedin for a tour in the North Island, our house 

 being in charge of a housekeeper during our absence. In the front 

 hall there stood a large ornamental fern-case, filled vsdth local ferns 

 (Asplenium, Hymenophyllum, Trichomanes, etc.), and in this case lived 

 a full-grown green frog, which, however, seldom showed itself. We 

 were absent about six weeks, returning at the end of January, 1885. 

 The ferns had not been watered in our absence, with the result that 

 all the filmy and more delicate ones were dead. My wife was too 

 disappointed to start re-filling the case, and it was carried out to a 

 lumber room in an outside shed, and left there for over a year. In 

 March, 1886, Mrs Thomson thought she would like the case re- 

 stocked with ferns, so I personally set to work to empty out the old, 

 perfectly dry material, and incidentally said that I would search for 

 the skeleton of the frog. I could not find it anywhere, but in the 

 bottom of the case, under one of the largest dead ferns, was a lump 

 of clayey soil about four inches in diameter, quite dry externally. On 

 breaking this up I was intensely surprised to find the frog, looking 

 very much as it was when we last saw it — 15 months before — and 

 perfectly cool and moist. I at once put it into a glass vessel, shut a 

 common house-fly in, when the frog immediately came to attention, 

 and caught and ate the fly. It fed quite freely afterwards and lived 

 for some months, when it perished by a singular accident. Its little 

 glass-house was left standing on my microscope table in a window 

 facing the midday sun. A large bull's eye condenser stood on the 

 table near the window, and this unfortunately focussed the sun's rays 

 on to the glass-case, and when discovered half an hour after the 

 unfortunate frog was dead. The ball of clay in which the frog was 

 found after its 15 months' imprisonment was not, as far as either 

 of us could remember, in the case originally. We both thought that 

 the animal had in some way or other gathered it together as a protec- 

 tion, but how it managed to get inside the ball and apparently leave 

 no external aperture, I cannot explain. It seems to me that the 

 incident throws some light on the stories which one occasionally reads 

 in newspapers about frogs being found inside of rocks and stones. 

 Our frog was not in a rock, but it was inside a remarkably hard piece 

 of clay, and yet it managed to breathe and retain its moisture for 

 that long period of time. 



