The answer to these rash believers in what they call "the evidence of their own senses" and the disentombment of living specimens of the ancient world from lumps of stone or of coal--apart from that given by the fact that there is complete absence of any proof that the toad before liberation was really and truly encased in a stony chamber to which it could not, by any possibility, have recently gained access--is that the common toad, which is thus discovered and supposed to be a survivor of long past geologic ages, is a modern production of Nature's great breeding establishment. It is quite easy to distinguish it from all other living species of toads; it is spread over a limited area, existing in the north temperate region of our hemisphere in many parts of which it is replaced by other similar but distinct species. If we ask what is known of it in past ages as revealed by the Pliocene, Miocene, and Eocene strata, we find that it did not exist at all in the latest of these, but was represented by ancestors like it, yet markedly different. Remains of a kind of toad are found in the Upper Eocene "phosphorite" of the South of France, and in 1903 such remains were found in an oolitic deposit. As we descend further the series of geologic strata, the remains of toads and frogs cease to occur. In the coal measures they were represented by ancestors provided with tails like the newts and salamanders of our own day. They had not come into existence, nor, probably, had any creature closely resembling them, at that period. In the "Coal Measures" we find abundant remains of very large and also of small animals related to salamanders, newts, and less closely to toads, but they are in great and important features of structure unlike the Amphibia and Batrachia of to-day. Hence the notion which lay at the bottom of the excitement caused by the discovery of live toads in the interior of rocks or of coal--namely, that the creature was a survivor from the lost world of extinct "antediluvian" animals--falls to the ground. It has no better claim to attention than the similar but perhaps bolder statement indulged in from time to time by an inventive transatlantic Press, namely, that "some workmen on blasting a rock in the quarries at Barnumsville were astonished by the escape from a cavity within the solid rock of a large flying lizard or pterodactyle, which immediately spread its wings and flew out of sight."