Frogs

“ A quick start, a thrust like lightning—then you would see him shake his frog savagely, beat it upon the nearest stone or root, glide to a tuft of grass, hide his catch cunningly, and go on unincumbered for the next stalk, his weather-vane swinging, swinging in the ceaseless search for frogs, or possible enemies. ”

“ Frogs are croaking; those persistent frogs whom the muses have ordained to sing for aye in spite of Bion and all tuneful poets dead. We sit and watch the water snakes, the busy rats, the hundred creatures swarming in the fat, well watered soil. ”

“ Now in the well were some frogs, so the elder sister said: “Sister, do you see these frogs? The name of the Rajah you are about to marry is Dhuddoo, or Frog, and you think that he is a man, but he is, in reality, a frog.” ”

“ I well remember that in my childhood I had a great dread of toads and frogs, and a relative, to whom I owe much for having directed my mind into the love of animated nature, took up a frog in her hand and made me look at the beautiful gold circle round its eyes, its curious webbed feet, its leaping power arising from the long hind legs ”

“ At length, after many consultations with her cap, the affair was settled, and at the end of the second year after her parting with the queen they all set out.
First walked her bodyguard of grasshoppers, followed by her maids of honour, who were those tiny green frogs you see in the fields, each one mounted on a snail, and seated on a velvet saddle. Next came the water-rats, dressed as pages, and lastly the frog herself, in a litter borne by eight toads, and made of tortoiseshell. ”

“ Whenever we went there we always took away the side fences, and sat flat down upon the smooth stones at the edges of the brook and played with the frogs.
Here we used to watch our gay young polliwogs grow into frogs, one leg at a time coming out at each “corner” of their fat wriggling bodies. We kept two great bull-frogs,—splendid bass singers both of them,—that had been stoned by naughty small boys, and left for dead by the roadside. ”

“ We are all well acquainted with the common frog, whose grander name is Rana temporaria. We see it—and it is to be feared some of us kill it—in our gardens, among strawberry-beds and damp vegetation. But, whereas frogs feed upon those slugs and insects which are in the habit of pasturing upon our plants, and are themselves indebted to us for not a grain of vegetable matter, we ought by all means to be grateful to them. ”

“ Recently caught Water-frogs are wild beyond description, much more so than the Grass-frog, but even they calm down after some time, learn to know their keeper, and allow him to handle them without trying to commit suicide by jumping on to, into, and down anything. ”

“ Indeed, everything that could hum, or buzz, or sing, or bloom had a part in my education-noisy-throated frogs, katydids and crickets held in my hand until forgetting their embarrassment, they trilled their reedy note, little downy chickens and wildflowers, the dogwood blossoms, meadow-violets and budding fruit trees. I felt the bursting cotton-bolls and fingered their soft fiber and fuzzy seeds; ”

“ But if thou wilt not let them go, behold I will strike all thy coasts with frogs.
8:3. And the river shall bring forth an abundance of frogs; which shall come up and enter into thy house, and thy bedchamber, and upon thy bed, and into the houses of thy servants, and to thy people, and into thy ovens, and into the remains of thy meats:
8:4. And the frogs shall come in to thee, and to thy people, and to all thy servants. ”

“ It is as impossible to guess the direction whence the noises come as it is to find the creatures themselves. They are but a million infinitesimal shrillnesses merging in an uproar that nevertheless soothes and lulls. From the gray void where by day there was a river come other voices, they tell me those of frogs. ”

“ So industrious are frogs in slug-hunting, that it would be quite worth while to introduce them as sub-gardeners upon our flower-beds. In catching insects, the frog suddenly darts out his tongue, which, at the hinder part, is loose, and covered with a gummy matter. The insect is caught, and the tongue returned with wonderful rapidity. The frog, when it is first hatched, has the constitution of a fish: it is purely aquatic; has a fish's heart, a fish's circulation, and a fish's gills. The tadpole swims as a fish does—by the movement, side-ways, of its tail. ”

“ When you see a frog hopping across your path, you see a creature which has known many a change in its life, for frogs are among those very interesting animals which undergo what are called metamorphoses. ”

“ Frogs lie in wait for them when in quest of water, which, in fact, is their principal occupation at the time they are rearing their young. And it is not only the frog that frequents ponds and streams that is thus injurious to them, but the bramble-frog as well, which will come to the hives even in search of them, and, crawling up to the entrance, breathe through the apertures; upon hearing which, a bee flies to the spot, and is snapped up in an instant. ”

“ In the bass or treble notes of the croakers who hide amid the shade and coolness of those aquatic plants and grasses, is an indication that frogs of various species are quite at home with the eel-like creatures gliding through the water. ”

“ Another little frog spends its entire life in the leaf-formed cup of a bromelia, a plant somewhat similar in appearance to a small century plant, which grows on the branches of trees where its roots get a precarious foothold. During the rainy season this cup becomes filled with water. There the frog lays its eggs, which hatch as pollywogs.
Truly demonic are fantastic horned frogs of Brazil which devour other amphibians and small mammals. The largest of them do not hesitate to defy a human being in the mountain rain forests, their chief habitat. ”

“ Perhaps a big frog will push out from the grass and go in fat leaps down to the water—plop! and away he swims with his sarcastic nose up and his legs going like fury. The strange, very-little-boy motions of a frog in water is a thing to ponder over. There are small frogs also, every bit as interesting, thin-legged, round-bellied anatomies who try to jump two ways at once when they are observed, and are caught so easily that it is scarcely worth one's trouble to chase them at all. ”

“ Curiously enough, during the winter seasons, when frogs as a rule are lying asleep at the bottom of a pool, this frog used to come out of his hole and seek a snug place near the kitchen fire, where he would continue to bask and enjoy himself till the servants retired to rest. ”

“ Frogs in all parts of the world are, usually, protectively coloured with greens or browns; and the little tree-frogs are either green like the leaves they rest upon, or curiously mottled to imitate bark or dead leaves. ”

“ At the time when the tail is laid aside, the young frog is very small, and in this state is generally found to swarm immediately after rain. The frog-showers, of which we so often hear, are probably occasioned, not by the actual descent of frogs from the clouds, but from the genial influence of the moisture on the young frogs who have already been hatched and developed, and who have been biding their time before they dared to venture abroad. ”

“ Saturday, 28th.—The numerous frogs remind me that the moist weather and approaching winter have brought into active life an immense quantity of these creatures, some of which make a hard co—ax, co—ax, sort of noise, and others a most mournful and horrible bellowing, which might be mistaken for the high note of a bull ”

“ The frog has sometimes found a place in Christian symbolism as the most expressive image of the resurrection of the body, because frogs, like the serpents after their winter interment, emerge from their hiding-places and renew their youth by casting their slough. ”

“ The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. ”

“ All our frogs lay their eggs in water in rounded masses, not in strings, as do the toads, usually attached to some submerged stick or plant stem. The tadpoles, light in color, are very voracious, and feed on every sort of flesh that they can bite off and chew with their horny jaws. On the approach of winter the frogs—except the wood frog, which hibernates in the loam of the forest, or in some rotten stump—sink into the mud of the pond or marsh where they live, and pass the cold months in torpidity. ”

“ The habits of the Grass-frog are essentially terrestrial. It spends most of its time on land, preferably in damp places, but local fashion permits of a great deal of freedom, as these frogs are sometimes found not only in very wet, naturally irrigated places, but also in the water itself. ”

“ SOME BOYS, playing near a pond, saw a number of Frogs in the water and began to pelt them with stones. They killed several of them, when one of the Frogs, lifting his head out of the water, cried out: “Pray stop, my boys: what is sport to you, is death to us.” ”

“ Sometimes one of these women may be seen with ten or twelve pounds’ weight of frogs in her bag. Frogs are cooked on a slow fire of wood-ashes, and being held in one hand by the hind legs, a dexterous pinch with the finger and thumb of the other at once removes the lower portion of the intestines, and the remainder of the little animal is then taken at a mouthful. ”

“ The principal trouble seems to be the difficulty of obtaining natural food in sufficient quantities to prevent the old frogs from devouring their young, which they will do on all occasions. Again, the young frog, from the tadpole stage up to the perfect frog, is surrounded by enemies night and day—aquatic birds, turtles, lizards, snakes, leeches, insects, fish, water-rats, and, worst of all, his own relations. ”

“ Our modern tailless Amphibia, frogs and toads, appear much later in the story of the earth, but they are not without interest here on account of the remarkable capacity which they show to adapt themselves to different surroundings. There are frogs, like the tree-frog of Martinique, and others in regions where water is scarce, which never pass through the tadpole stage; or, to be quite accurate, they lose the gills and tail in the egg, as higher land-animals do. ”

“ After he had obtained her confidence, she ate from his fingers dead as well as living flies. Frogs will leap at a moving shadow of any small object; and both Frogs and Toads will soon become sufficiently familiar to sit on the hand, and be carried from one side of the room to the other in order to catch flies as they settle on the wall. ”

“ They pass through their development and metamorphosis very rapidly, appearing immediately after a rain and laying their eggs in temporary pools. At this time of egg-laying they utter extraordinarily loud and strange cries. Some frogs in other parts of the world live in trees, and the eggs of one species are deposited on the leaves of trees, leaves which overhang the water being selected so that the issuing young may drop into it. ”

“ Of frogs there are several kinds, such as the small green tree frog, the small frog common in the United States, which sings in the spring of the year, a species of frog frequenting the water, much larger than the bull-frog, and in shape between the delicate length of the bull-frog, and the shorter and less graceful form of the toad like ”

“ Both live on live prey, as for example aquatic larvæ, worms, flies and other insects, and snails, and they never touch vegetable matter; therefore they are good helpers in our gardens.
“Tree-toads—or, less correctly, tree-frogs—differ from ordinary frogs in having viscous cushions at the end of their toes, which enable them to climb trees, where they hunt insects. They stay all summer in the foliage and go to the water only to lay their eggs. Their cry, which gains force from a sort of pocket that shows plainly under the throat, is very loud and raucous. ”

“ Indeed, some of the most important facts. in physiology have been, and constantly are to-day being, demonstrated upon frogs; and the list of such conquests, and the light they shed upon this most useful kind of knowledge, are altogether too long to enter upon here. Much is to be learned by simply studying the action of a large, healthy frog in a tub of water. ”

“ The green frogs are very handsome, being marked over with brown oval shields on the most vivid green coat: they are larger in size than the biggest of our English frogs, and certainly much handsomer in every respect. ”

“ Cats, geese, owls, vultures, hawks, otters, and other creatures eat frogs, and the luckless creatures can hardly appear without finding an enemy. To balance this destruction of their forces they produce great numbers of eggs. When tadpoles first reach the frog state they are black. I have seen hundreds of them together, so that the pond mud seemed alive and crawling. ”

“ A case of evolution.—The advantage which accrues to a frog from being thus rendered less conspicuous to enemies and prey alike is obvious, and there is no difficulty in picturing to ourselves the probable manner in which the advantage was developed. Widely different races of animals have colour-specks in the skin, and we may assume that frogs and their ancestors have possessed such spots for countless generations. ”

“ But these physical peculiarities are, after all, a minor consideration, and the low estimation in which frogs are regarded really arises from an irreparable misfortune which has befallen the whole race—namely, their inability to stand upright. ”

“ On the other hand, when we take frogs along a line that is very vital to them, namely, the discrimination of palatable and unpalatable insects, we find, by experiment, that they are quick to learn and that they remember their lessons for many days. Frogs sometimes deposit their eggs in very unsuitable pools of water ”

“ This tongue is covered with a glue-like secretion, and when an insect is to be captured the tongue is snapped forward from the mouth, and the insect adheres as to bird-lime. Some frogs have cheek-pouches, and some drum-like throat-plates, wherewith to make their loud croak.
What is the life history of our frog? From seed to seed [Pg 226] is plant-life story; from egg to egg is frog story. The eggs of the frog are deposited in roundish masses attached to sticks lying in water, or to the stems and leaves of submerged water-plants. ”