The Toad has the homing faculty well developed. By the judicious wriggling of his hind quarters he scoops out a hollow in the soil, preferably under a root or stone, so that he can lie without being conspicuous. In the evening he sets out hunting, and may travel some distance; but before morning he is back snugly in his form, where he may be found during the day for many months. A similar sense of locality--"orientation" the naturalists call it--is manifested in the choice of ponds for breeding. Any chance pool, however temporary in character, will serve the Frog, but the Toad is more particular and has special requirements for a nursery. Any one who has observed our batrachians during a series of years must have noticed that scores of Toads may be seen in early spring, all converging upon a particular pond, perhaps passing some other piece of water that looks quite suitable for their purpose. In a garden where we kept a portion wild as cover for many of the smaller animals, we had a considerable number of Frogs and Toads that had come there voluntarily. A small pond was freely visited by them, together with Newts, an occasional snake and stray aquatic birds. The Frogs and Newts bred there every year; the Toads never. In a field two or three hundred yards beyond our boundary was a large deep pond that had formerly been a brickmaker's pit, but the suitable earth being exhausted it had been allowed to fill with water. To this pond Toads came in the spring from all quarters. On a mild moist evening when the great impulse took possession of the Toads, we used to see scores of them hopping across a well-used road that divided the grasslands, and next morning would see the lifeless bodies of many that had been flattened out by motor-wheels in the dark. On the further side of the pond the continuity of the grassland was again broken by a railway line, and here you would see them hopping across the track and climbing over the rails, many, of course, meeting fate in the adventure. In our present neighbourhood there is a large pond fed by springs from the plateau gravels of an extensive common. In the days of our boyhood there was open grassland and copse between the common and the pond with only an ordinary hedge to mark that it was private land. At the present time the pond forms a fine piece of ornamental water in a private garden, and on all sides residential roads surround it. Yet this pond must have been a Toads' breeding place in the old days, for in the spring we find Toads on the tarred sidewalks of the roads seeking for gaps in the fence through which they may reach the desired trysting place; and we have sometimes put them in the way of finding it. It is very probable that in such cases the Toads are making their way back to the identical pond in which they first saw the light--a corollary to the case of the migrant birds that find their way back to build their nests in the copse or hedgerow where they were hatched.