662 ON SECTION AVICULARIA OF THE GENUS POLYGONUM. 
right hind foot to aid his jaws, grasping his abdomen with his foot, 
and, by a little effort, getting hold of the worm in his stomach 
from the outside; he thus by his foot held fast to what he gained 
by each swallow, and presently succeeded in getting the worm 
entirely down. 
A garter-snake was observed this summer in North Conway 
pushing a toad down his throat by running it against clods and 
stones ; just as the toad crowds down a locust. 
The amount which a toad can eat is surprising. One Tuesday 
morning I threw a Coreus tristis to a young toad, he snapped it up, 
but immediately rejected it, wiped his mouth with great energy, 
and then hopped away with extraordinary rapidity. I was so 
much amused that I gathered some more of the same bug and 
carried them to a favorite old toad at the northeast corner of my 
house. He ate them all without making any wry faces. I gath- 
ered all that I could find on my vines, and he ate them all, to the 
number of twenty-three. I then brought him some larve of Py- 
gera ministra, three-quarters grown, and succeeded in enticing 
him to put ninety-four of them on top of his squash bugs. Find- 
ing that his virtue was not proof against the caterpillars when I 
put them on the end of a straw and tickled his nose with them, 
he at length turned and crept under the piazza, where he re- 
mained until Friday afternoon, digesting his feast. 
A gentleman having read this paper told me he had seen the 
toad tuck in the last inch of an earth worm with his hand, Euro- 
pean fashion. I then remembered that I have several times seen 
our toad put the last quarter-inch of earthworms in with his hand ; 
-but never saw him take his hand to a locust. 
ON SECTION AVICULARIA OF THE GENUS 
POLYGONUM. 
BY SERENO WATSON: 
. — Mersner’s Polygonum § Avicularia is equivalent nearly to section 
Polygonum of Linnæus, the original genus Polygonum of Tourne- 
fort and Adanson, to which Linnæus added, as codrdinate sections; 
Persicaria, Bistorta and some other old genera. Its most dis- 
