9. When these were laid upon a table, it would follow them, and, at a certain distance, would fix its eyes and remain motionless for a little while, as if preparing for the stroke, which was always instantaneous.
10. It threw out its tongue to a great distance, when the insect stuck by the glutinous matter to its lip, and was swallowed with inconceivable quickness.
11. After living under the protection of its benefactor upwards of thirty-six years, it was one day attacked by a tame raven, which wounded it so severely that it died shortly afterward.
12. The erroneous opinion of toads containing and ejecting poison has caused many cruelties to be exercised upon this harmless, and undoubtedly useful tribe. Toads have been inhumanly treated, merely because they are ugly; and frogs have been abused, because they are like them.
13. But, we are to observe, that our ideas of beauty and deformity, of which some arise from natural antipathies implanted in us for wise and good purposes, and others from custom and caprice, are of a relative nature, and peculiar to ourselves.
14. None of these relative distinctions, of great and small, beautiful or ugly, exist in the all-comprising view of the Creator of the universe: in his eyes, the toad is as pleasing an object as the canary-bird, or the bulfinch.
LESSON XXIII.
Maida, the Scotch Greyhound.—Altered from Bingley.
