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Updated: May 9, 2025
After this important change, the true batrachian is incapable any longer of living continuously in water, and either betakes itself altogether to the land, or seeks the surface from time to time to replenish its exhausted lungs.
Moving waters, laden with a last waning gleam, glided from beneath these vapoury exhalations, and even trifling rivulets, now invisible save for chance splashes of light, lacked not mystery as they moved from darkness into darkness with a song. Stars twinkled above the dewy sleep of the earth, and there brooded over all things a prodigious peace, broken only by batrachian croakings from afar.
His wife was an invalid, and wishing to tempt her appetite he had prepared a frog by skinning it, and had hung it upon one of the copper hooks. The only use intended to be asked of this renowned batrachian was the making of a little broth.
He exploits the batrachian or the reptile with no less animation. He accepts without hesitation extraordinary finds, probably unknown to his race, as witness a certain Goldfish, a red Chinese Carp, whose body, placed in one of my cages, was forthwith considered an excellent tit-bit and buried according to the rules. Nor is butcher's meat despised.
In modern pictures of the frog with which I am familiar, this batrachian is always represented dorsally or ventrally with the legs outstretched, while in the lizards, as we have seen, a lateral view is always adopted.
The portrait of his grandfather had the features and aspect of the philosopher, only much more exaggerated: he was not dressed, and the colour of his body was singular; the breast and stomach yellow, the shoulders and legs of a dull bronze hue: the great-grandfather was a magnificent specimen of the Batrachian genus, a Giant Frog, 'pur et simple.
It was a droll moment with Nature, when she entertained herself and prepared entertainment for us by devising the frog, that burlesque of bird, beast, and man, and taught him how to move and how to speak and sing. Iglesias and I did not disdain batrachian studies, and set no limit to our merriment at their quaint, solemn, half-human pranks.
The eater of sacrificial libations learnt of the treachery of the frog. Coming to that animal, he cursed the whole batrachian race, saying, "Ye shall henceforth be deprived of the organ of taste." Having denounced this curse on the frog, he left the spot speedily for taking up his abode elsewhere. Verily, the puissant deity did not show himself.
He is probably the worse-tempered and most irritable batrachian known, and when prodded with a stick would puff himself out, and work himself into a hideous passion.
Those who have seen a newt in its larva state, may form a correct idea of the gills which project from either side of the head. Naturalists differ in opinion as to whether it is really an adult batrachian, or merely the larva of some much larger creature.
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