A Book of Nimble Beasts: Bunny Rabbit, Squirrel, Toad, and "Those Sort of People"English, Douglas
General
A Book of Nimble Beasts: Bunny Rabbit, Squirrel, Toad, and "Those Sort of People"
English, Douglas
Animals -- Juvenile literature
Well, if you keep your glass bottle with the eggs in it in a good place
and look at it every day, you will find something fresh to interest you
every day. First the black yolks will grow larger and change their shape
so that they seem longer than they are broad, and presently you will
find that they are turning into tadpoles. The baby tadpole seems much
too fat to begin with, and sticks out in front like a little alderman;
but soon he gets slimmer again, and you find that he is growing a curly
tail (which no alderman ever did), and that there are tiny markings
where his eyes and mouth are going to be. He is still very small (about
a quarter of an inch long), but before he is much bigger a very
wonderful thing happens--it has been happening all the time, though you
have not been able to see it--he grows a pair of gills like a fish. They
are delicate, feathery things, and stand out on either side of his head,
I should like to say "neck," but I do not think I ought to because frogs
and toads have no necks at all, and so I suppose tadpoles have none
either. All this time his tail is growing too, and presently it is long
enough for him to swim with. When this happens he slips out of the jelly
and wriggles about in the water. At present he has no real mouth, but he
has a little opening, shaped like a horseshoe, near to where his mouth
is going to be, and he uses this to hold on to weeds when he is tired,
which he very soon is at first.
Once he is fairly hatched, however, his mouth grows quickly and he gets
a pair of rather hard little jaws with which he can nibble the
water-weed. When this happens you must, of course, put some water-weed
into the bottle, though grass will do if you can't get anything else.
[Illustration: TADPOLES FULL GROWN
They are covered with little specks of gold. At the bottom
one can be seen feeding]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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