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Yet, when they came to the great level valley beyond the second range of hills, the biting gale appeared to greet them with a fury pent up for the purpose. Unobstructed it swept across the desert of snow, flinging not only the shotlike particles from the sky, but also the loose, roving drift, as dry as salt, that lay four inches deep upon the solider snow that floored the plain.
Making a section through a mass of snow which has accumulated in many successive falls, we note that the top may still have the flaky character, but that as we go down the flakes are replaced by adherent shotlike bodies, which have arisen from the partial melting and gathering to their centres of the original expanded crystalline bits.
If the visit is made in the season when snow falls, which is commonly during most of the year, he may observe, as before noted in our winter's snow, that the deposit, though at first flaky, attains at a short distance below the surface a somewhat granular character, though the shotlike grains fall apart when disturbed.
The result is that eggs appear encased in two slender strings of jelly, each having a diameter about that of a lead pencil. At intervals of not more than half an inch the shotlike eggs may be seen. The mother toad, in laying these eggs, moves about rather restlessly in the water. By this means she succeeds in wrapping the strings about the grass and sticks of the pool.
The upper portion of the mass was blown upward in fragments, the discharge being like that of shot from a fowling piece; the fragments, varying in size from small, shotlike bits to masses larger than a man's head, were shot up sometimes to the height of fifteen hundred feet above the point of ejection.
When the mating comes, the female discharges a series of small shotlike eggs which are encased in a very tenacious mucous. While they are being deposited the male fertilizes them. No sooner have the eggs, fertilized by the sperm cells, reached the water than the mucous at once begins to swell.
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