1. Each Mrs. Frog lays about one thousand eggs, and if they all hatched and grew, every swampy country would soon be overrun with frogs.
2. But fish, birds, and serpents eat them in such numbers that they only about hold their own year by year. Some kinds of frogs are also found to be good food for men, and are caught for that purpose.
3. Frogs are lively and noisy in the first warm days of spring and summer. The little peeping frogs keep up their shrill music all night and day, and with it we hear the deep voice of the bull-frog, like a bass-drum heard at a distance.
4. The bull-frog is the largest of the frog kind. It eats worms, insects, and snails, and sometimes it even eats its own tadpoles.
5. In summer, we hear among the trees a shrill kind of whirring sound, which is kept up for a long time without any pause. This is the song of the tree-frog, sometimes called the tree-toad.
6. This is a very small frog. It is born in the water, like other frogs; but when it comes out in the spring, it climbs into the trees and lives there.
7. Its feet spread out into broad, flat toes, from the bottom of which comes out a sticky fluid. By means of these toes, which partly act as suckers, the frog can crawl along on the under side of branches without falling.
8. The color of the tree-frog is so much like that of the wood it clings to that it can not be seen unless we look very closely for it.