HOW OLD WERE THEY?

New Zealand Graphic, Volume VI, Issue 37, 13 September 1890, Page 18

HOW OLD WERE THEY?

How long is it possible for toads ami frogs to live in a state of hibernation 1 No one can tell. The following stories, apparently authentic, are found in Cyrus Eaton’s ‘ History of Thomaston, Maine.' Taken by themselves they sound incredible, but as Mr Kirby says in the ‘ Encyclopedia Britannica,’ ‘ Too many circumstantial accounts of the discovery of live toads embedded in solid rock, and even in coal, har e been published to allow us to dismiss them all as fabulous, notwithstanding the difficulty and obscurity in which this subject is still involved.’ About a quarter of a mile from the left margin of Mill River, says Mr Eaton, Simeon Blood, Senior, in digging a well, discovered at a depth of about thirty feet from the surface, some small masses of matter resembling stones with earth adhering to them. These, on examination, proved to be frogs ; and one of them, when warmed by the sun and air, hopped off with a frog’s usual agility. Whilst hibernating in the mud, they had probably been covered over by a deposit pf earth brought by a flood or current of water, and buried too deep for the ensuing spring to reach and re animate them ; but at what epoch, ami by how many successive deposits who shjill pretend to say ’ In 1853, as Thomas Gould, Esq., was watching the operations in the Fulling-mill lime quarry, he saw the workmen blast out from the solid ledge, eighteen or twenty feet below the surface, a black and at first perfectly torpid toad. It soon showed signs of life, and during his temporary absence hopped away, as the workmen, said and was not again found, —leaving only a cavity in the rock to mark the prison-house of this relic of the antediluvian world.