Diversions of a Naturalist

by Sir E. Ray Lankester

CHAPTER XXXVIII
TOADS FOUND LIVING IN STONE

IT is quite true that one should not refuse to entertain the possibility of something almost incredible taking place, simply because it is highly improbable that it has taken place. Also it is important that one should not accept and believe in the reality of the marvellous occurrence, merely because a decent sort of person has asserted that he has witnessed it and is satisfied of its reality. In a previous chapter ([p. 117]) we have seen how the story of the Tree goose and the hatching of geese from Barnacles was supported by respectable but incompetent witnesses such as Gerard, the herbalist, and Sir Robert Moray, the first president of the Royal Society. There are many equally baseless fancies which are attested by "respectable" witnesses at the present day.

The statement that workmen splitting large blocks of stone in the quarries have seen a toad hop out of a cavity in the interior of the stone attracted a good deal of attention in the earlier half of last century. I do not know whether it can be traced to any great antiquity. I see no reason to doubt the truth of the statement in its simple form as given above. It has, I have no doubt, repeatedly happened—as letters to newspapers and in earlier days serious pamphlets record—that on splitting a block of stone the workmen engaged in the operation have seen a toad emerge from the broken mass. The fact is that the rocks in many stone quarries are "fissured" or cracked, so that a narrow space or "crack" extends through many feet of thickness of rock to the surface, which is covered by vegetable mould. Occasionally, owing to rain and flood, the mould is washed away, and some of it carried into the cracks or fissures in the rock. Occasionally a young toad is carried from the surface into such a fissure and far down its sides, and eventually lodges 20 feet or more in the thickness of the rock. The same circumstances which have carried the toad into the fissure carry in also from time to time small worms, grubs, insects, on which the toad may feed, but in any case the far-spreading though narrow fissure will hold plenty of air and moisture, and even without food a toad can remain alive for several months provided that the temperature is about that of a cool autumn day, its surface kept moist and the air also. Hence it is in accordance with recognized conditions that occasionally quarrymen should "get out" a block of stone deep below the surface in a stone quarry which is traversed by a fissure or has a small natural cavity in it (as limestone and other rocks often have) communicating with a fissure, and that when they break the stone and accidentally open the fissure or connected cavity a healthy living toad is found ensconced in it. The recent washing of clay and powdered stone into the fissure by rain and flood sometimes may hide its existence from the casual observation of the workmen, and the soft material washed in may even be found fitting closely to the toad's body. And thus it will appear that the toad is very closely embedded in the solid stone.

Probably no one would have cared very much a couple of hundred years ago if toads were constantly present in the centre of solid stones. Toads were regarded as queer, dangerous things connected with witchcraft, and there was no accounting for their behaviour. The view taken by the well-to-do class would have been in those days (as perhaps it would be less generally to-day) similar to that of the Chicago millionaire when shown, by means of the spectroscopic examination of light, the proof of the existence of the metal sodium in the sun. The professor who took the millionaire round his laboratory wished to interest him in the discoveries of science, and hoped that he might contribute to the funds necessary to pay for the elaborate and delicate instruments by which such discoveries are made. He showed many remarkable experiments to his visitor, and wound up by showing him the two narrow lines of yellow light caused by incandescent sodium. He showed him how exactly their position in the spectrum could be fixed and measured; how they caused two black lines in the spectrum of light, which was made to traverse a flame in which incandescent sodium was present. And then he showed him that in the spectrum of the sun's light there were two black lines (besides thousands of others) which exactly coincide with the two sodium lines; whilst others of the black lines in the solar spectrum coincide with bright lines given out by incandescent hydrogen, iron, magnesium, etc. The millionaire followed it all and understood the completeness of the demonstration. The professor was delighted and hopeful. Then the millionaire said, "Who the hell cares if there is sodium in the sun?" I was not told by the disappointed professor (it was Professor Michelson, and he related this little episode at a dinner of the Royal Society) what reply he made to this inquiry or whether he was eventually successful in his attempt to secure funds from the millionaire. The attitude which the millionaire took towards scientific discovery is not a natural one, but the result of the stifling of natural interest and curiosity by long concentration on the art and practice of money-making. So, too—owing to other mental pre-occupations and concentrations—though a boy or a savage might have been puzzled and deeply interested in the occurrence of a live toad in the middle of an apparently solid piece of rock, the "country gentleman" of the eighteenth century would have said, if the matter had been pressed on his attention, "Who the hell cares if there are live toads in the rocks?" And a large but decreasing number of his representatives to-day would make the same remark.

It, however, happened that at the beginning of the nineteenth century a spirit of inquiry into the history of the crust of our earth was set going. The science of geology was eagerly pursued by many capable men, both abroad and in this country. The Geological Society of London was founded in 1809. The doctrine of the vast age of the earth and the demonstration of successive layers of deposit—forming its rocks and containing the remains of strange and of gigantic animals unlike those now existing—excited widespread interest and controversy. Buckland introduced the study of geology in Oxford. Lyell was his pupil, and became the great teacher and exponent of geological theory in a series of masterly treatises, written in such form that they appealed during half a century to educated men of all professions and occupations. The country clergy and their friends gave themselves with enthusiasm to the investigation of strata and the collection of fossils. Now came the opportunity of the toad embedded in stone!

It is not worth while inquiring who was the first to make the suggestion, but it very soon became one of the favourite assertions of the wonder-mongers who hang on to the skirts of science—not to be confused with the enthusiastic nature-lover—that the living toads found in blocks of stone, and sometimes in lumps of coal, are thousands of years old, contemporary with the geologic age of the rocks in which they are found embedded, survivors of the extinct animals whose bones and teeth the geologists had discovered and described, also embedded in such rocks! This entirely baseless fancy took root, and has flourished ever since the early Victorian period. Only a few months ago there were paragraphs in the papers on the discovery of a live toad of antediluvian age in a block of stone. Old gentlemen have repeatedly written to the newspapers, and sometimes privately to me, describing how they had, on breaking an unusually large lump of coal in the dining-room coal-scuttle, liberated from an age-long prison an antediluvian toad, which hopped out from the lump of coal in a marvellous state of health and agility. Whenever any discussion has arisen with regard to these statements, and such an explanation offered as I have given above as to the apparent enclosure of a toad in a piece of rock, or a similar explanation as to the encasement of one in the black mud adhering to lumps of coal stacked in sheds or cellars—some of the would-be believers in the immense age of the liberated toads appeal to the fact that amongst the most remarkable extinct animals whose bodies are found in ancient strata are reptiles, whilst others, more learned, insist on the well-known prevalence of the remains of animals of the class Amphibia, to which the toad belongs, in the "Coal Measures."

The answer to these rash believers in what they call "the evidence of their own senses" and the disentombment of living specimens of the ancient world from lumps of stone or of coal—apart from that given by the fact that there is complete absence of any proof that the toad before liberation was really and truly encased in a stony chamber to which it could not, by any possibility, have recently gained access—is that the common toad, which is thus discovered and supposed to be a survivor of long past geologic ages, is a modern production of Nature's great breeding establishment. It is quite easy to distinguish it from all other living species of toads; it is spread over a limited area, existing in the north temperate region of our hemisphere in many parts of which it is replaced by other similar but distinct species. If we ask what is known of it in past ages as revealed by the Pliocene, Miocene, and Eocene strata, we find that it did not exist at all in the latest of these, but was represented by ancestors like it, yet markedly different. Remains of a kind of toad are found in the Upper Eocene "phosphorite" of the South of France, and in 1903 such remains were found in an oolitic deposit. As we descend further the series of geologic strata, the remains of toads and frogs cease to occur. In the coal measures they were represented by ancestors provided with tails like the newts and salamanders of our own day. They had not come into existence, nor, probably, had any creature closely resembling them, at that period. In the "Coal Measures" we find abundant remains of very large and also of small animals related to salamanders, newts, and less closely to toads, but they are in great and important features of structure unlike the Amphibia and Batrachia of to-day. Hence the notion which lay at the bottom of the excitement caused by the discovery of live toads in the interior of rocks or of coal—namely, that the creature was a survivor from the lost world of extinct "antediluvian" animals—falls to the ground. It has no better claim to attention than the similar but perhaps bolder statement indulged in from time to time by an inventive transatlantic Press, namely, that "some workmen on blasting a rock in the quarries at Barnumsville were astonished by the escape from a cavity within the solid rock of a large flying lizard or pterodactyle, which immediately spread its wings and flew out of sight."