May 8, 1900

RETURNING to our pond this morning to see whether the water-lilies propose flowering this season, I find that the frogs have been depositing spawn along its edges, so that the thongs of Irish leather may become necessary sooner than I expected!

All the same I am delighted to see the frog-spawn, for I have an affection for tadpoles. Youthful associations cluster pretty thickly around them, but apart from such a merely sentimental attachment, there is a satisfaction, I may say a zoologic thrill, about this transition of a water-living and water-breathing animal into an air-breathing one; a transition going on, moreover, not at some remote, and more or less dubious geologic age, but under one’s very eyes, even, as in this case, in the middle of one’s own decorous, shaven lawn.

It is difficult to remember that frogs breathe air as much as we do ourselves. Unlike ourselves, and their other zoologic betters, they do so, however, not by alternate contractions and dilations of the chest, Nature not having provided them with ribs, but by the doubtless more archaic process of swallowing air. Not only would a frog die if kept too long under water, but—seeing that it can only swallow air by shutting its mouth—were that mouth kept forcibly open it would equally die, and from the same cause, namely, want of breath. Tadpoles, on the other hand, are strictly water-breathers, and until they have shed their gills, have no more need to go to the surface to breathe than a fish has. That, by the way is not an absolutely accurate illustration, seeing that certain fishes do need to go to the surface for air. The famous Anabas, or “climbing perch” of India, is such an air-breathing fish, the air reaching it by means of cavities on either side of its gills, and if prevented from reaching the surface, and renewing the supply, it would “drown like a dog,” or so the scientists assert. Such cases, however, can hardly be called normal. Fishes that can live comfortably for days out of the water, that can nest in a bush, and travel across a particularly dry country, are not likely to be met with in zoologic rambles about this parish.

Returning to our Irish frogs, it is an odd fact, especially considering their recent introduction, that in addition to swarming over the lowlands, and in every place dear to frogs, they have learnt to climb long distances up hill, and to establish themselves in ponds separated widely from any others, often not even fed by streams, and moreover destitute of nearly all other animal inhabitants, with the exception of certain minute molluscs, which are believed by zoologists to have reached them upon the feet of wading birds, and that at such a remote period of time that they have become what are practically new species.

Many years ago, on reaching the top of Mweelrea, the leading mountain of Connemara, I remember my surprise at finding swarms of young tadpoles wriggling along the margin of a small pond, nearly upon the actual summit. They were still in the engaging comma-like stage, before legs had begun to dawn upon their consciousness, and seemed to have remarkably little to eat, for the water was crystal clear. The pond was one of that attractive kind known as corries, held by the geologists, doubtless truly, to be of glacial origin; a delicious clean-cut oval; pure rock, from marge to marge; gouged, as if by the chisel of Michael Angelo, from the matrix in which it lay. But for the unmistakable evidence of the tadpoles it would, to any reasonable imagination, have suggested the bath of some mountain nymph very much sooner than frog-spawn.

We are all of us to-day evolutionists, if some of us still with a certain amount of reservation, and to the evolutionist tadpoles must always prove interesting acquaintances. They provide us with at least an inkling as to the fashion in which your unadulterated water-breather may have been converted into an air-breather, and by means of no process more recondite than that of losing its gills. That such conversions do take place, and under certain circumstances remain permanent, has been proved in the well-known case of the axolotl, or Mexican gilled salamander. As long ago as the year 1867, while conducting some experiments at the Jardin des Plantes, M. Duméril startled the zoologic world of Paris by communicating the fact that, out of a number of axolotls kept in the collection there, about thirty had left the water, and had assumed the form of what had hitherto been regarded as an absolutely distinct genus of land salamander, known as amplystoma. This discovery made at the time a prodigious stir, not so much on account of a water-breathing creature losing its gills, and becoming an air-breather, for that was a phenomenon which might be seen every spring, and in most of the ditches round Paris, but because the axolotl was known to breed, and that it therefore appeared to indicate the exceedingly anomalous case of a larval form proving to be fertile.

How the feat of transformation was to be actually witnessed was the next problem, and it is pleasant to remember that it was through the energy and perseverance of a woman naturalist, Fraulein Marie von Chauvin, that the matter was finally cleared up. By continually damping the specimens of axolotl kept by her on land, and assiduously feeding them, she was able to preserve two out of five through the gradual process of decreasing their gill-tufts, and tail-fins, changing their skins, and so forth. Finally to her own and everyone’s triumph, the complete amplystoma form was assumed, and the transformation was thereby accomplished. The world has seen a fair number of miracles since it began to run its course, and perhaps not the least difficult of those miracles to receive with absolute credulity have been some of its natural ones!

Mafeking-day, 1900

IT is the nineteenth of May. S. S. has returned, and the east wind which has long been vexing our souls has departed for the moment, and a soft caressing zephyr blows seductively. The garden, comforted by recent showers, is smiling one broad smile from the red steps at the top of it to the new pergola at the bottom. And now this morning comes the news of the Relief of Mafeking. Joy for the victors; joy for the nation; joy for everything and everybody. Flags flutter from all the posts; the dogs strut about in new tricolor rosettes; “the air breaks into a mist with bells.” All this is well, very well. Only; only. A few lines coming by the same post, a single short note, and for one person that May sunshine is blotted out as effectually as though the very orb itself had perished. The garden with all its flowers; the copse surrounding it, new clad in gala attire; the whole cheerful little picture has become darkened; its atmosphere changed; its pleasant anticipations turned into a simple mockery. Even to-day’s news sounds thin and unreal, and the tale of Mafeking is as it were the tale of some defence read of long since in an ancient, a seldom-opened history, the actors and heroes of which have long vanished and been forgotten. We are but poor, bedimmed mirrors all of us, and what we reflect is rarely the real thing, more often only some blurred and distorted image projected by our own sad selves.