Sometimes, when one is poking about in the brooks in the spring of the year—as every boy and girl should do, for it is great fun—one happens upon masses of transparent jelly half as large as one’s head, full of tiny black dots. These black dots, which are just about the size of the o’s in this book, are the eggs of frogs. If instead of being in round masses, they are in long strings, a yard sometimes in length, then they are almost always the eggs of toads; but if they occur neither in masses nor in strings, but separately, then they are the eggs of newts. It seems strange that a frog should be able to lay a mass of eggs and jelly forty or fifty times larger than the frog itself. The real egg, however, is only the dark speck; and this when it is first laid has only a thin coating of jelly, hardly thicker than paper and nearly dry. As soon, however, as it touches the water, this dry jelly begins to swell, and goes on swelling and swelling for three hours until it is a hundred times larger than it was to start with. These balls of frog’s eggs look, then, very much like tiny hens’ eggs with black yolks, broken into a bowl ready for cooking. They really are not quite this; because the frog’s eggs have no shell and no white, being simply yolk and nothing else. In fact, the only sorts of eggs that do have white are those of birds and reptiles; while few others have shells either. The jelly of frog’s eggs is not “white,” because it is not meant for the little frog to eat, but to keep other creatures from eating him. Besides this, it helps to keep the little chap warm. You will recall that the little chick begins as a tiny dot on one side of the yolk, and keeps growing larger and larger until it uses up both yolk and white and fills the entire shell. Not so the little frog. Always, from the very beginning, it is as large as the egg. It is the egg, in fact. You can see that the egg is dark above and light below just as the tadpole will be, and the frog after him. At first, however, the baby tadpole does not have any parts or members. He gets in proper succession, eyes, ears, backbone, brain, skin, tail, and the rest; but he does not grow any larger until he hatches out, wriggles his way thru the jelly, and begins to eat. At first the tadpoles are very tiny, only a quarter of an inch in length; and they cling in tufts to the under side of the water plants. After that, I suppose, everybody knows what happens.