"Of the above curious occurrence my only knowledge is derived from the account written to a distant friend, of which the substance has now been extracted. The writer is an utter stranger, but he was officially employed in the operations which resulted in the discoveries; and my information leads me to believe his report deserving of confidence, for which reason I have not hesitated to offer this abstract for publication in the _Zoologist_."[102] The Rev. Alfred Charles Smith, an excellent and genial naturalist, favours us with another case, introducing it incidentally in illustration of the general habit he is denouncing of wantonly destroying animal life:--"As an instance of this thoughtless cruelty, I must give an account that has just come to my notice. Some labourers were pulling down an old wall, in the thickness of which they found one of those phenomena--so frequently heard of and so unsatisfactorily accounted for--a Toad completely imbedded in stone and mortar. 'There was no doubt,' said the labourer who described it, 'that he had been there for a great number of years, for there was no hole or chink by which he could have entered or left the place of his long sojourn.' 'Well,' said the listener to his account, 'but are you sure that the Toad was alive when you found it?' 'No doubt of that, sir,' said the man, 'for he crawled out of his round hole and was moving away, when I knocked him on the head with my pickaxe.' "So here was this poor harmless creature, whose long incarceration in his gloomy dungeon might have excited compassion in his favour, suddenly released from his prison, only to be slain by his liberator!"[103]