The overture of yet another spring chorus has been performed, and now the music swells, taken up from pond to pond as the vernal waves roll northward; the frogs are singing and the children hunting for spawn. “In this spawn of a lentous and transparent body are to be discerned many specks, or little conglobations, which in a small time become of a deep black - now of this black and dusky substance is the frog at last formed.” At the end of Sir Thomas Browne’s account of the “porwigle or tadpole” he exclaims, “What a long line is run to make a frog!”
Nature study is more popular and far more free from error than it was in his day; the learned doctor would have been amazed to find young children intelligently following “the long line” between spawn and frog. The “porwigle” is still a “conglobation,” but the child knows that it will eventually hop, tailless, on four tiny limbs, a perfect and beautiful little frog. Weeks ago a frog emerged from its hiding-place in my rockery and went a-wooing, and many of those parent frogs who lay hidden and secure in mud all winter will shortly be the victims of ducks, rats, foxes, or other foes, but the “long line” is running, and the useful and abundant frogs will be ready to do their work when insects are plentiful.
