Once they got the better of the argument, at all events in the eyes of the owner of the farming stock, and my poor newts were ejected. It happened thus:—
Two or three specimens I kept in my own room in a glass vase, in order to watch them more closely; and some six or seven others lived as stock in the large horse-trough, from whence they could be taken when required.
One day the proprietor came to me and ordered the destruction of my newts, for they had killed one of his calves.
“But,” I remonstrated, “they cannot kill a calf or even a mouse, for they have no fangs and very little mouths. Besides, the calf has not come near this trough.”
So saying, I took up several of the newts, opened their mouths—no easy matter, by the way—and showed that they had no fangs. And I urged, that even if they had been as poisonous as rattlesnakes, it would not have made any difference to the calf, which had never left the cowhouse, and was at the opposite end of the farm-yard, separated by a barn and several gates. But all was useless.
“There are the newts, and there is the dead calf!” was the answer; and so the newts had to go. However, I would not suffer them to be killed, but put them into a bag and took them back to the pond whence they had come.
Afterwards the proprietor said that the calf died because its mother had drunk at the trough in which the poisonous newts were.
Now, the funniest part of the story is, that there was not a horse-pond that did not swarm with efts, and consequently all the foals and calves ought to have died. Only they didn’t.
The care which the female newt takes in depositing her eggs is very remarkable.
