44 THE NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 
many years, till he grew to a monstrous size, with the maggots 
which turn to flesh-flies. The reptile used to come forth every 
evening from a hole under the garden-steps ; and was taken 
up, after supper, on the table to be fed. But at last a tame 
raven, 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 Ray’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 
emigrants, no larger than my finger nail. 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 tree-frog is an English reptile ; it abounds in Germany and 
Switzerland. 
It is to be remembered that 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 eft was hatched, 
lived, and died, in the water. But John Ellis, Esq., F.R.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 biped from South Carolina, that the water-eft, or 
1 White was mistaken here: the tail of the tadpole does not drop off, 
but is transformed. 
