THE CHANGES IN THE FROG.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XIV, Issue 63, 14 March 1879, Page 4

THE CHANGES IN THE FROG.

Nowhere in the animal kingdom is there so favourable an opportunity for peeping into natures workshop as in the metamorphoses of the irog. This animal is a worm when ife comes from the egg, and remains such the first four days of its life, having neither eyes nor ears nor nostrils nor respiratory organs. It crawls. It breathes through its skin. After awhile a neck is grooved into the flesh. Its soft lips are hardened into a horny beak. The different organs, one after another, bud out ; then a pair of branching gills, and last a long and limber tail. The worm has become fish. Three or four days more elapse, and the gills sink back into the body, while in their place others come, much more complex, arranged in vascular tufts, 112 in each. But they, too, have their day, and are absorb d, together with their framework of bone and cartilage, to be succeeded by an entirely different breathing apparatus, the initial of a second correlated group of radical changes. Lungs are developed, the mouth widened, the horny beak converted into rows of teeth ; tho stomach, the abdomen, the intestines prepared for the reception of animal food instead of vegetables ; four limbs equally equipped with hip and Bhoulder bones, with nerves and blood vessels, push out through the skin, while the tail, being now supplanted by them as a means of locomotion, is carried away piecemeal by the absorbents, aad the animal passes the remainder of its day as an airbreathing and flesh-Heeding batrachian. Perm Monthly.