XVII.] 
OF SELBORNE. 
55 
monstrous size. The reptile used to come forth every evening 
from a hole under the garden steps ; and was taken up on the 
table to be fed after supper. But at last a tame raver, kenning 
him as he put forth his head, gave him such a severe stroke with 
his horny beak as put out one eye. After this accident the 
creature languished for some time and died. 
I need not remind a gentleman of your extensive reading 
of the excellent account there is from Mr. Derham, in liay's 
" Wisdom of God in the Creation/' concerning the migration of 
frogs from their breeding ponds. In this account he at once 
subverts that foolish opinion of their dropping from the clouds 
in rain ; showing that it is from the grateful coolness and 
moisture of those showers that they are tempted to set out on 
their travels, which they defer till those fall. Frogs are as yet 
in their tadpole state ; but in a few weeks our lanes, paths, 
fields, will swarm for a few days with myriads of those emi- 
grants, no larger than my little-finger nail. Swammerclam gives 
a most accurate account of the method and situation in which 
the male impregnates the spawn of the female. How wonderful 
is the economy of Providence with regard to the limbs of so 
vile a reptile ! While it is an aquatic, or in a tadpole state, it 
has a fish-like tail, and no legs : as soon as the legs sprout, 
the tail drops off as useless, and the animal betakes itself to 
the land.^ 
Merrit, I trust, is widely mistaken when he adv^ances that 
the Rana arhorca is an English reptile ; it abounds in Germany 
and Switzerland. 
It is to be remembered that the Salamanclra aciuatica of Eay 
(the water-newt, or eft) will frequently bite at the angler's bait, 
and is often caught on his hook. I used to take it for granted 
that the Salamandra aquatica was hatched, lived, and died, in 
the water. But John Ellis, Esq., F.E.S. (the coralline Ellis), 
asserts, in a letter to the Royal Society, dated June 5th, 1766, 
in his account of the Mud inguana, an amphibious bipes from 
South Carolina, that the water-eft, or newt, is only the larva of 
the land-eft, as tadpoles are of frogs. Lest I should be suspected 
of misunderstanding his meaning, I shall give it in his own 
^ The tail of the tadpole does not drop otf ; it is absorbed. 
