1920 .] 
Natural-history Notes. 
221 
It was got in this way. The gold-diggers were washing the soil of a 
mountain-stream in the machine called ‘ k long-tom.” In excavating the 
banks they displaced several large boulders of quartzy rock, underneath 
which was discovered the living frog. The gold-diggers, who voluntarily 
submit to the evils and miseries of such a gambling trade, and can rarely 
be excited by anything unless a great nugget, were so much astonished at 
the sight of a frog that one of them desisted from the seductive occupation 
he was at, and took the frog, and put it into a bottle of water. As the 
bottle was tightly corked, the animal soon died ; but so anxious were the 
diggers to preserve it that they stuck the dead frog on the trunk of a 
dead kauri-pine to dry, and when they saw me they gave me the animal. 
I took it to the place where Lieutenant-Governor Wynyard was holding a 
conference with the tribes for the purpose of making a treaty to enable 
the Europeans to dig gold. 
The frog was shown to many of the natives, and was carefully examined 
by several intelligent old men, one of whom was Taniwha, a celebrated 
chief, who recollects the last visit Captain Cook paid to this country. 
None of these individuals had ever seen the animal before, nor could they 
give any name to it. All the New-Zealanders present were much struck 
with its appearance, and they said it must be the atua, the spirit or god 
of the gold, which had appeared on the earth ; many of them shrunk 
back from it in horror, and some of them were inclined to draw unfavour¬ 
able omens from its discovery at such a particular time. 
At Auckland I met natives from all parts of the Island to whom I 
showed th) frog, but none of them had ever seen it before. Three other 
frogs were caught by the gold-diggers in a different stream from the one 
in which the specimen was found. One of these was lost, and the natives 
insisted that the other two should be set at liberty, lest evil should come 
on to the party who caught them. The country where the frogs were 
found is made up of plutonic and metamorphic rocks, which rise in some 
places to 1,500 ft. It forms a peninsula from Cape Colville to the mouth 
of the Thames. The rivulets in which the frogs were found ran down 
the western side of the range into the harbour of Coromandel. The hills 
are thickly covered with fine timber, and the streams are beautifully 
shaded from the heat of the sun. 
Description of the frog, taken from the specimen discovered: Length of 
body, 1 in. ; head more round and less pointed than that of Rana palustris 
of Europe ; mouth large, with teeth in the upper jaw; skin smooth 
and shining, with small rounded tubercles or papillae on the sides ; 
posterior extremities short, with four toes ; eyes prominent, colour olive- 
brown, with a white spot between them ; the colour of greyish-white, back 
brown, the belly of a lighter brown, which extends round and forms a 
border on either side of the brown of the back. The extremities are 
marked across with lines of brown and greyish-white alternately. 
Remarks .—Bory St. Vincent states* that frogs and toads are not found 
in any of the volcanic islands of the great oceans. But this idea is not 
now correct as regards the North Island of New Zealand, though the 
statement is still apparently correct as regards the other islands in the 
Pacific Ocean. In the Sandwich group of islands there are neither frogs 
nor toads.f 
In the Galapagos ArchipelagoJ there are no frogs or toads, and I have 
examined men who have lived at Tahiti, the Navigators Group, the 
* Voyages aux Quatre lies d'Afrique. 
f History of Hawaiian Islands, by James Jackson Jerves, London, 1843. 
j Darwin’s Voyages 
