Toads do not breed, or produce their kind, until they are 3 or 4 years old. When at this age Miss Toad, or Frog, awakens from her long winter’s sleep, she feels hungry, and glad, perhaps, that she has lived through the winter, for she feels life within her. Undoubtedly she is glad and happy to be awake, and off she goes to search for food and friends. Perhaps she finds Mr. Toad, who, too, feels life stirring within him; he also feels the joy of spring, so together they go to the breeding pond. Like Mrs. Buttercup, Mrs. Toad has within her body a little nest where little seeds or eggs have been kept and have been growing, and now that the time has come when they need awakening to a new life, they need life from the Father Frog just as the buttercup needed pollen from the stamen. Mr. Toad (or Frog), too, is stirred by this new and wonderful life giving desire within him—this desire to mate—and when Mrs. Toad (or Frog) feels the eggs are to be expelled, he comes very close to her, and in order to fertilize every egg before it goes into the water, he holds her fast behind the arm, and as they are expelled he pours over them his life giving fluid, which enters every tiny egg and gives it life—a new life. In a few days the eggs begin to grow; they are all incased in a colorless, transparent jellylike substance, which serves as food for the tadpole while forming, and also for protection. They are spherical in shape, and in ten days the pond will swarm with tiny tadpoles. Mrs. Frog lays between 500 and 1,000 eggs at one time; Mrs. Fish, however, is still more prolific, for she lays 1,000,000 eggs. Mrs. Fish lays her eggs in the water. She cleans a place by blowing all rubbish away with her fins, and there she deposits her eggs. Many of these float away before they can be fertilized by Mr. Fish. Impress the child with the knowledge that here is one of nature’s earliest signs of motion. That the flowers could not move about to seek their mates, but the fishes, frogs and all higher forms of life do this, and are more particular as they ascend the scale of life. Thus, the children were taught that the higher in the scale of development living creatures go, the greater care must be given them. Not only to the undeveloped seed within the mother’s body, but also to the egg after it has passed from her to the nest, for as creatures develop and ascend the scale, their eggs and offspring become fewer. And emphasis was laid on the care Mr. Frog took to fertilize the egg BEFORE it went into the water—one step higher than Mr. Fish. There is no doubt that the words “cold-blooded,” as applied to frogs and toads, hit the mark, for there is not the slightest affection or sympathy shown or felt for their own kind. They give no care or concern to the eggs after they are deposited, and the “polly-wog” has to depend on himself. Nature seems to have given them but one instinct relative to their kind, and that is the one blind impulse or instinct of reproduction.