Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 2.djvu/697

Rh frog in Æsop's fables trying to make himself as big as a cow; and he is covered all over with a number of spines, which are not unlike the spines on a blackthorn-bush. The edges of the flattened body are armed with a row of sharp prickles like the teeth of a saw; the head, which the little beast twists about in a Punch-like manner, is separated from the body by a short neck. Near the nape of the neck there are two sharp-pointed horns directed backward; the sides of the neck are armed with three or four shorter horns, so that the animal appears to have on a collar such as we see depicted upon the necks of wolf-hounds



in Reidinger's splendid old German hunting pictures. The general color is like that of the toad, and he has a mottled belly, like that poor old toad about which so many "crammers" have been told relative to his being found buried in coal, stone, trees, etc.—antediluvian toads, "who swam about in the limpid streams wherein Adam bathed his sturdy limbs," etc. Toads, nevertheless, will stand a deal of burying; and so will horned frogs, for the individual whose likeness is now before you came by post all the way from Santiago, in Southern California. He was packed in a thin pasteboard box, and it is a wonder