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The Ceratophrys croaks when angry, and as it is the most truculent of all batrachians it works itself into a rage if you go near it. Its first efforts at chanting or singing sounds like the deep, harsh, anger-croak prolonged, but as the time goes on they gradually acquire, night by night, a less raucous and a louder, more sustained and far- reaching sound.
Really, by-the-by, I cannot give you a better instance of what I mean, than in my little diatribe on the Geryon Trifurcifer, a small reptile which I found, some years ago, inhabiting the mud of the salt lakes of Balkhan, which fills up a long-desired link between the Chelonia and the Perenni branchiate Batrachians, and, as I think, though Professor Brown differs from me, connects both with the Herbivorous Cetacea, Professor Brown is an exceedingly talented man, but a little too cautious in accepting any one's theories but his own.
Talking of puzzling classifications, this is just the place for mentioning the batrachians, who have been made into a class by themselves, but who most distinctly belong to two classes at the same time; not like the crocodile by details borrowed from each, but by a fundamental change which takes place at a certain period in their organization.
I daresay some benighted denizens of the remote rural districts might be found, who still say 'tadpole, whereas we know only that embryonic batrachians exist: and it is just possible that in the extreme western wilds a poor girl might rashly state that being sleepy she intended 'going to bed, which you must admit could be an everlasting stigma and disgrace here, where all refined people merely 'retire; leaving the curious world to conjecture whither, into the cabinet of a diplomatist, the confession box of a cathedral, the cell of an anchorite, or to that very essential and comfortable piece of household furniture which at this instant I fully appreciate, and which the Romans kept in their cubiculum.
Flanking and behind us marched the giant batrachians, fivescore of them at least, black scale and crimson scale lustrous and gleaming in the rosaceous radiance; saucer eyes shining circles of phosphorescence green, purple, red; spurs clicking as they crouched along with a gait at once grotesque and formidable.
These half-human, highly developed batrachians they call the Akka prove that evolution in these caverned spaces has certainly pursued one different path than on earth. The Englishman, Wells, wrote an imaginative and very entertaining book concerning an invasion of earth by Martians, and he made his Martians enormously specialized cuttlefish.
By these huge batrachians was an extensive marsh inhabited, and battening upon the succulent nutriment thus afforded, the African geese gained a size and flavor which was rapidly making the fortune of Wilhelm Klingenspiel.
Nothing but a streak out of a fifty-dollar lecture. As when, at some unlooked-for moment, the mighty fountain-column springs into the air before the astonished passer-by, silver-footed, diamond- crowned, rainbow-scarfed, from the bosom of that fair sheet, sacred to the hymns of quiet batrachians at home, and the epigrams of a less amiable and less elevated order of reptilia in other latitudes.
Suddenly I felt, well, a little superfluous. "If you don't mind," I said, "I think I'll go up the path there again and look about." But they were so engrossed with each other that they did not even hear me so I walked away, up to the embrasure where Rador had taken me. The movement of the batrachians over the bridge had ceased. Dimly at the far end I could see the cluster of the garrison.
Naturalists are most desirous that the habits and metamorphoses of this creature should be carefully ascertained, for great doubts have been entertained as to the position it is entitled to occupy in the chain of creation. Batrachians.
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