OF SELBOBNE. 
63 
I need not remind a gentleman of your extensive reading 
of the excellent account there is from Mr. Derham, in Ray's 
'^Wisdom of God in the Creation (p. 365), 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 emigrants, no larger than 
my little finger nail. Swammerdam gives a most accurate 
account of the method and situation in which the male im- 
pregnates 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 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 ! ^ 
Merret, I trust, is widely mistaken when he advances 
that the Bana arhorea is an English reptile ; it abounds in 
Germany and Switzerland. 
It is to be remembered that the Salamandra aquatica of 
Kay (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., P.R. S., 
(the coralline Ellis) , asserts, in a letter to the Eoyal Society, 
dated June the 5th, 1766, in his account of the mud inguana, 
an amphibious hipes from South Carolina, that the water-eft. 
^ Mr. Bell has pointed out that the whole of the typical BatracJiia, 
the frogs, toads, newts, salamanders, &c. undergo a complete metamor- 
phosis. In the land species, which from their habits have no constant 
access to water, the aquatic portion of their existence, during which the 
gills remain attached, cannot be passed in that medium in the same 
manner as the frogs, &c. They undergo the metamorphosis therefore in 
the oviduct, before they are excluded from the mother, and come forth 
in the perfect condition. But in the other forms, the change takes 
place in the water, and the young live there for a time in a fish-like 
state, as regards not only their respiration, but most of the other 
functions of life. — Ei>. 
