186 A GARDEN DIARY 
who, in the year 1705, turned out a handful of 
spawn into a ditch near Trinity College. For 
some years the frogs appear to have contented 
themselves with the neighbourhood of that 
University, but sixteen years later, in 1721, they 
were found forty miles away, from which point 
they seem to have rapidly extended themselves 
over the whole island. Incidentally the fact is 
confirmed by a great, if hardly a zoological 
authority, namely, Dean Swift. In his Con- 
siderations about Maintaining the Poor, which 
appeared in the year 1726, in the course of 
thundering against certain fire offices, which had 
the impertinence to be English, he declares that 
“their marks upon our houses spread faster and 
further than a colony of frogs.” The portent, 
therefore, it is plain, had reached his ears. 
Coincidences are attractive things, and it is 
satisfactory to discover that as regards earlier 
times we are again able to fortify our mere lay 
zoology upon the authority of an eminent eccle- 
siastic. This time it was St. Donatus, bishop of 
Etruria, who, writing in the ninth century, assured 
the world, upon his episcopal authority, that no 
frogs or toads existed, or, moreover, could exist 
in Ireland) Three centuries later Giraldus 
Cambrensis tells us, however, that in his time 
a frog was taken alive near Waterford, and 
brought into court, Robert de la Poer being 
then warden. “ Whereat,” he says, ‘“‘ Duvenold, 
