[Illustration: _Pl. 99B._ Eggs apparent after absorption of water. *Development of Frog's Eggs.*] [Illustration: _Pl. 99C._ Germs assume Tadpole form. *Development of Frog's Eggs.*] [Illustration: _Pl. 99D._ Tadpoles begin to hatch out. *Development of Frog's Eggs.*] [Illustration: _Pl. 100A._ Immature Tadpoles on outside of egg-jelly. *Early stages of Common Frog.*] [Illustration: _Pl. 100B._ Tadpoles begin to leave. Egg-jelly decomposing. *Early stages of Common Frog.*] [Illustration: _Pls. 100C,D,E,F._ Rise and decline of tail, and development of limbs. *Early stages of Common Frog.*] [Illustration: _Pl. 101._ _M 161._ *Edible Frog.* Rana esculenta.] Mr. E. S. Goodrich, F.R.S., has recently demonstrated that eggs obtained from a female Frog by dissection can be fertilised by the leucocytes or colourless corpuscles of the blood. He exhibited a fatherless Frog, so obtained, before the Linnean Society in November, 1918. When all the tadpoles have become real little Frogs, with their legs sufficiently firm to enable them to indulge in hopping exercises, they still for a time venture no further than the very shallow water at the extreme edge of the pond, where they can walk partially submerged. Then one day there comes a heavy summer rain storm--a deluge on a small scale. Every little Frog then appears to hear the word "Go!" for with one impulse they all scramble out of the pond into the jungle of wet grass, they know not whither. If there is a road near, that is the place in which to form an idea of their prodigious numbers. The few wayfarers who may be hurrying along that road, looking for possible shelter from the pitiless rain, and seeing the Frogs hopping along much as the raindrops bounce, are quite prepared to declare that they came down from the clouds with the rain. Many persons who in the ordinary affairs of life would be regarded as reliable witnesses have testified that this is what happens. To them it seems a much more reasonable explanation of this sudden appearance--they term it a phenomenon--than the naturalist's statement that the Frogs had been waiting in the pond for the psychical moment to arrive for their dispersion--the time when the reeking herbage of many acres around would offer the safest conditions for their tender bodies to embark on the great adventure of life, their distribution over wide areas where they could carry out their proper function, the control of any inordinate increase in the insect population. For months they will crawl and hop invisibly among the lush grass and journey through the dense herbage of hedgebottoms and spinneys. Some will come under fences even into our gardens, to help us in an unequal warfare in which the gardener is always defeated by the insect, whether the bigger combatant admits it or not. Their food consists entirely of insects, slugs, and worms.