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We have not, it must be noted, any specimens of the toad-stone at the present day actually known to have been brought from Coptos. It is quite possible that the fossil fish-tooth was substituted ages ago for Pliny's Batrachites, and was never found at Coptos at all! Whether that is so or not, the fact is that Pliny never said it came out of a toad, but merely that it was of the colour of a toad.
* See Pliny's Letter Bonnet, in his lively way of expressing himself, says, "Comparing Pliny's Letter with the account of the Acts, it seems to me that I had not taken up another author, but that I was still reading the historian of that extraordinary society." This is strong; but there is undoubtedly an affinity, and all the affinity that could be expected.
It was not to be expected that a lad intolerant of rule and disregardful of restriction, who neglected punctuality in the performance of his exercises, while he spent his leisure in translating half of Pliny's history, should win the approbation of pedagogues.
And, madame, upon his side he does not reverse the order of the story and of nature, and sink from the Prince into the Beast. The last time that the Easy Chair saw that remarkable man, Henry Thoreau, he came quietly into Mr. Emerson's study to get a volume of Pliny's letters.
Pliny's description of the Clitumnus may be interestingly compared with the passage of this poem in which Ausonius recounts, with fine and observant touches, the beauties of his northern river the liquid lapse of waters, the green wavering reflections, the belt of crisp sand by the water's edge and the long weeds swaying with the stream, the gleaming gravel-beds under the water with their patches of moss and the quick fishes darting hither and thither over them; or the oftener-quoted and not less beautiful lines where he breaks into rapture over the sunset colouring of stream and bank, and the glassy water where, at evening, all the hills waver and the vine-tendril shakes and the grape-bunches swell in the crystal mirror.
There are fairer fishes in his pages than any now swimming in our streams, and some sleep of his on the banks of the Merrimack by moonlight that Egypt never rivalled; a morning of which Memnon might have envied the music, and a greyhound that was meant for Adonis; some frogs, too, better than any of Aristophanes. Perhaps we have had no eyes like his since Pliny's time.
But the records of his own observations are so intermingled with knowledge drawn from books that it is difficult to distinguish the one from the other. Nor does this greatly matter, for whether as closet-student or field-naturalist, Pliny's trait of mind is essentially that of the compiler. He was no philosophical thinker, no generalizer, no path-maker in science.
But it seems likely that the author's memory, or rather the information communicated to him regarding the closing scene of Pliny's life, was defective. Flames and sulphurous vapors could hardly be actually present at Stabiae, ten miles from the centre of the eruption.
After the reading, he linked his arm in Pliny's, and said in so winning and withal so natural and matter-of-course a tone, "It will be very pleasant to have a companion to kneel with me I have always felt a desire for one," that Pliny did not choose to decline.
Another suspicious circumstance in Pliny's account is his reference to the serpent's egg composed of snakes rolled together into a ball. He states that he himself had seen such an 'egg, of about the size of an apple. Pliny, too, states that Tiberius Caesar abolished by a decree of the Senate the Druids and the kind of seers and physicians the Gauls then had.
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