Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/393

Rh to be met with in various parts of New England. This is only one of many outgrowths of the old superstition regarding the "venom" of the toad. The Swabian folk medicine, according to Dr. Buck, credits toad-spittle with being very poisonous, and mere contact with a toad is said to cause a limb to swell, especially if the animal has first been made angry. Levinus Lemnius speaks decidedly of the poisonous character of these really harmless creatures; but it is needless to multiply quotations to show how general has been the belief that toads and all pertaining to them were poisonous to man.

Occurring in great abundance in summer upon the young shoots of many plants, and especially upon the culms of grasses, the little flecks of froth in which are concealed the pupa of the frog-hoppers or spittle insects (Cercopidæ) are not popularly known to be the exudation of an insect, but are supposed to be the spittle of some animal, and hence the substance has received a variety of common names. I find the name "toad-spit" given to this exudation in eastern Massachusetts, parts of Maine and northern New Brunswick, and the same name is applied to it in parts of England and in the Isle of Jersey. In Jersey the old notion of the toad's venomous character obtains and its spittle is thought to be poisonous, "to poison the blood," as the peasants say; so of course the "toad-spit" upon the plants, being thought to be veritable saliva of toads, is avoided. A woman from Bathurst, New Brunswick, tells me that the so-called toad-spit is frequently found on wild strawberry plants, and the berry-pickers are careful not to gather any fruit on which is to be seen any of this much feared pseudo-spittle, for, as she says, "you know the berries would be rank poison, for toads are very poisonous; they take all the poison out of whatever they touch. If they are in a well, they suck up all the poison out of the water, and so, when they spit, of course, this poison will be in their spit." In Reading, Mass., the exudation of the tiny creature, lurking unsuspected, within its frothy covering, is called either toad-spit or snake-spit, and barefooted children fear to let it touch their feet, as the saying is that it will blister the skin. Snake-spit is the name applied to the excretion in many other localities in New England. In Ipswich, Mass., children say that if you make a wish and then break off a certain number—twenty-five, I believe—of grass-stalks without losing the snake-spit on any one of them, your wish will surely come true. In parts of the Maritime Provinces of Canada and in Staffordshire, England, frog-spit is another name for the foamy masses. When a child, in northern Ohio, I remember to have often seen the grasses along the roadside besprinkled with the spit-like substance. I never heard any one speak of it, and I carelessly concluded that it was blown upon the grass by passing horses