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Updated: May 9, 2025
The total number of mammalia enumerated by M. Pomel as appertaining to the Lower Miocene fauna of the Limagne and Velay falls little short of a hundred, and with them are associated some large crocodiles and tortoises, and some Ophidian and Batrachian reptiles. The two upper divisions of the Swiss Molasse the one fresh-water, the other marine have already been described in the preceding chapter.
The unfortunate frog, so aptly named "the Job of physiology," becomes resigned to living under most dreadful conditions, and when, through sheer exhaustion, he has succumbed, his twitching limbs may still he used as an object of experimentation for twenty-four hours. Thanks are due to nature for giving so extraordinary a vitality to the tissues of a modest batrachian!
Tropical Cicadas ascend to the pine-woods above Lamteng in this month, and chirp shrilly in the heat of the day; and glow-worms fly about at night. The common Bengal and Java toad, Bufo scabra, abounded in the marshes, a remarkable instance of wide geographical distribution, for a Batrachian which is common at the level of the sea under the tropics.
It is of an olive-brown colour dotted with black, and a black streak reaching from one end of the body to the termination of the somewhat thick, short tail. Another curious batrachian, the mud eel, is found in Carolina, in marshy situations. Its total length is about three feet. The head is small, as is the eye, while on each side of it are three beautifully plumed gill-tufts.
This was as remarkable a sound as any animal sound to which I have listened, except only the batrachian-like wailing of the tree hyrax in East Africa; and like the East African mammal this South American insect has a voice, or rather utters a sound which, so far as it resembles any other animal sound, at the beginning remotely suggests batrachian affinities.
When they tell us, for instance, that a toad has hibernated for a million years in any one of the stratified rocks near the surface of the ground, we interpose the objection that none of these batrachian forms can exist for a period of more than twelve months without air and food.
Aph-Lin told me this fable while I gazed on the three Batrachian portraits.
There is nothing new in this experiment: the find has been treated just as though it lay on soil unsuitable for burial. The fall is the result of an attempt to transport the load. The time has come to set up the Frog's gibbet made famous by Gleditsch. The batrachian is not indispensable; a Mole will serve as well or even better.
"What did you strike but water?" "Wood; it nearly was the death of me. For weeks I was wid a cracked head and a cracked leg, yer honor!" Still there was something evasive about the man, and he had as many moods and lights as a sea Proteus, ugly and common, like that batrachian order, but often enkindled and exceedingly satisfactory as a servant.
A Batrachian of Brazil and the hot regions of South America, the Cystignathus ocellatus, no doubt fearing too many dangers for the spawn if deposited in the open water, employs the artifice of hollowing, not far from the bank, a hole the bottom of which is filled by infiltration.
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