A BARKING TOAD 
better be kept for the common toad and its immediate 
allies, and the rest of the Anurous Amphibians, or 
Batrachia, as their technical name goes, be called frogs. 
The Ceratophrys derives its name from the horn which 
in most of them surmounts the upper eyelid and adds 
to the fierceness of their aspect. The size of its mouth 
is exaggeratedly amphibian; and well it may be, for 
the beast is extremely partial to its own kind and even 
to its own species. It will gulp down quite a large frog 
without winking, or rather, to be more accurate, with 
that slow closure of the eye which is a necessary con- 
sequence of the structure of its throat and head. As 
the Ceratophrys is, as a rule and when undisturbed, toad- 
like in its equanimity, it is well for it that its hues assim- 
ilate so conveniently to the hues of a marshy environ- 
ment. Squatting down at rest in a shallow depression 
which conceals its “‘ inglorious belly,” the mottled green 
and brown of the back suggests a lump of earth partly 
overgrown with Conferve. Thus the frog has only to 
sit tight and the revolving hours must bring within its 
unerring grasp some wandering insect or reptile. These 
are seized and bitten with a very sharp and strong 
dental apparatus at the front of the mouth, which 
can also inflict a painful bite upon the human subject. 
The Cervatophrys is at times a peculiarly irritable 
amphibian. If handled disrespectfully it puffs itself 
out vastly, then gives vent toasound not by any means 
unlike a sharp bark. That bark is not worse than its 
bite by any means ; it is indeed the prelude to a forward 
jump combined with a snap. To outward appearance 
this frog is not widely different from other frogs. It is 
perhaps a little more apoplectic in its contours. Head 
merges into trunk with even less suggestion of a neck 
than in others ofitsrace. Internally some of the species, 
including Ceratophrys ornata, present us with an inter- 
esting survival from past times, as we perhaps assume 
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