Of the word frog we know nothing, although through the medium of many languages it has had as thorough an evolution as in its physical life. We must also admit our ignorance in regard to toad, backward search revealing only _tade_, _tode_, _ted_, _toode_, and _tadie_, the root baffling all study. Polliwog and tadpole are delightfully easy. Old forms of polliwog are _pollywig_, _polewiggle_, and _pollwiggle_. This last gives us the clew to our spelling--_pollwiggle_, which, reversed and interpreted in a modern way, is wigglehead, a most appropriate name for these lively little black fellows. Tadpole is somewhat similar; toad-pole, or toad's-head, also very apt when we think of these small-bodied larval forms. Salamander, which is a Greek word of Eastern origin, was applied in the earliest times to a lizard considered to have the power of extinguishing fire. Newt has a strange history; originating in a wrong division of two words, "_an ewte_," the latter being derived from _eft_, which is far more correct than newt, though in use now in only a few places. Few fishermen have ever thought of the interesting derivation of the names which they know so well. Of course there are a host of fishes named from a fancied resemblance to familiar terrestrial animals or other things; such as the catfish, and those named after the dog, hog, horse, cow, trunk, devil, angel, sun, and moon. The word fish has passed through many varied forms since it was _piscis_ in the old Latin tongue, and the same is true of shark and skate, which in the same language were _carcharus_ and _squatus_. Trout was originally _tructa_, which in turn is lost in a very old Greek word, meaning eat or gnaw. Perch harks back to the Latin _perca_, and the Romans had it from the Greeks, among whom it meant spotted. The Romans said _minutus_ when they meant small, and nowadays when we speak of any very small fish we say minnow. Alewife in old English was applied to the women, usually very stout dames, who kept alehouses. The corpulency of the fish to which the same term is given explains its derivation. The pike is so named from the sharp, pointed snout and long, slim body, bringing to mind the old-time weapon of that name; while pickerel means doubly a little pike, the _er_ and _el_ (as in cock and cockerel) both being diminutives. Smelt was formerly applied to any small fish and comes, perhaps, from the Anglo-Saxon _smeolt_, which meant smooth--the smoothness and slipperiness of the fish suggesting the name. Salmon comes directly from the Latin _salmo_, a salmon, which literally meant the leaper, from _salire_--to leap. Sturgeon, from the Saxon was _stiriga_, literally a stirrer, from the habit of the fish of stirring up the mud at the bottom of the water. Dace, through its mediaeval forms _darce_ and _dars_, is from the same root as our word dart, given on account of the swiftness of the fish.