Los Angeles Daily Herald

THE TOAD AND HIS PREY.
Peculiar Prevision of Nature by
Which he can Eat Insects.

I recently spent five or six hours on
a steamboat in company with a
stranger from Brooksville—a modest,
intelligent man, full twenty years my
junior. Just as we were nearing the
city of Bangor the remark of a third
party led him to say that the most
curious things he had ever seen in his
life was on the occasion of his splitting
a huge boulder in a field that he
might use the pieces for a stone wall.
and finding in the center of it a great
fat toad. If his report was true, it
would seem that the toad must have
crawled in or fallen into the fissure in
the first year of his life, and have
found in there a sufficient supply of
insects, either falling in or crawling
in, to sustain his life for four or five
years.

I presume you are all aware of the
peculiar manner in which a toad seizes
his prey. The root of his tongue is
fastened in the very front of his upper
jaw, while the tip lies far down his
throat. It thus lies directly over his
windpipe, and he would not be able to
breathe were not his tongue perforated
in the middle in exactly the right
place, so that it can act opening or
contracting, somewhat in the manner
of the glottis. When he sees any moving
thing which he judges to be an insect,
he throws the tip of his tongue
out with great accuracy of aim, picks
the insect up and thrusts it down his
throat with the rapidity of lightning.
Lay down an apple core, or a little
piece of shingle smeared with molasses
near a toad and you must watch very
sharply to see how it is that he so rapidly
transfers every fly that settles on
your bait to his own stomach.
The accuracy of aim in the young
toad is similar to the accuracy with
which the young quail or chicken
picks up a grain. A young chicken,
having only its head out of the shell
picked up a fly that lighted near it.
And, said Mr. Calthrop, when you
consider the nice co-operation of nervous
and muscular movement necessary
to this feat, you will perceive that
the chicken must have been practicing
fly-catching in the person of its ancestry
for thousands of millions of
years. But I once had curious proof
that the toad is capable of improvement
by practice. Under a bee-hive
in a garden at Cambridge I observed
for several successive summers a toad
watching for overloaded bees who
failed to reach the threshold of
the hives. No sooner did they
fall on the ground than he snapped
them up. But one day I saw he
had lost by some accident his right
eye, and when he struck at a bee he
lost his aim and picked up dirt from
one side of the bee. He wiped his
mouth with his fore-paw and tried
again and again. The bee generally
managed to climb to the top of some
little prominence on the ground and
fly away before the toad succeeded.
The poor fellow was half starved and
grew thin, but I observed that before
the summer was ended he had learned
to aim as correctly with one eye as he
used to with two, and had again recovered
his plumpness.

The toad's tongue usually puts
things down his throat so nicely that
he does not need much power of swallowing:
but he occasionally needs it.
and is forced to make up by mother
wit what is lacking in the powers of
his throat. You will observe this in
his efforts to take a grasshopper or locust.
A toad will sometimes attack
an object that is really too large for
him to get into his mouth. Thus I
have seen one attempt a huge caterpillar
of a sphinx, and I have known
of one undertaking a wounded humming
bird. In this case it was a perfect
failure. But when a toad has
transferred the head of a large locust
to his stomach and finds the hind legs
and tail protruding from his mouth he
usually turns to the nearest stone or
fence and pushes the grasshopper's
legs against the obstacle until he has
rammed it into his mouth. It would
seem from this that his stomach is
capable of considerable mechanical
extension without giving pain. And
were his stomach not somewhat insensible
he would be neither capable
of enduring the long fasts to which he
must sometimes submit nor of indulging
with impunity in the feasting and
overeating which we sometimes observe
in him.—[Boston Globe.