Batrachians live for hardly anything save reproduction. Outside their season of love, they remain stupefied. The rut over-excites them, and these slow, frozen animals then show themselves ardent and implacable. The males fight for the possession of females; having seized a female, nothing will make the male let go. One has seen him stick to his post even after his hind legs were cut off, even after losing half his body. Yet the copulation is mere simulacrum, it takes place by simple contact in the absence of exterior organs, even in salamanders, despite the pads which surround the cloaca, sketch of an apparatus which has remained extremely rudimentary, or possibly problematic. With anours, the male, smaller than the female, climbs on her back, passes his forefeet, his arms, under her armpits and remains skin to skin for a month, for two months. At the end of this time the pressed flanks of the female finally let fall the eggs, and he fecundates them as they fall. Such is the coupling of frogs, lasting from fifteen to twenty days. The male clambers onto the female, encircles her with his arms, crosses his hands over her breast, and holds her tightly embraced. He then remains immobile, in an ecstatic state, insensible to every external shock, to every wound. It would seem that the sole aim of this enlacing is to exercise a pressure on, or to cause an excitement in, the belly of the female and to make her deliver her eggs. She lays a thousand and the male sprays them with sperm as they pass. All the anours (tailless batrachians) thus press their females like lemons; but the method of fecundating the eggs is quite variable. The mid-wife toad enlaced like the others, aids the emergence of the egg garland with his hind feet, he unrolls it grain by grain, with devotion, while the female, immobile emptier, lends herself willingly to this manœuvre, which she feels perhaps as a caress. The aquatic toad does not pull at the garland, he receives it in his paws, and when he has ten eggs or so, he sprinkles them, ejaculating with a movement of the flanks, which old Roesel[1] compares to that of a dog's in coition. As for the common land toad, whose note sounds like a pure crystal bell in calm of the evening, he waits until all the eggs have emerged, he arranges them in a heap, then excited by somersaults, he drenches the lot of them.