When Master Froggie was a young tadpole, some pond or ditch was his home,
for he was an aquatic animal; but now that he is full-grown he has passed
into another way of living: he breathes, or rather swallows _air_, and
must, as he swims about with his beautifully webbed feet, come to the
surface of the water now and then, or he would die. I am sure you know the
frog well enough, and you may even have heard the harsh croak from which
it has its name, as you have passed some damp meadow or weedy pond, on a
summer evening. But I wonder whether you know frogs' eggs when you see
them?
My brothers and I did not, long ago, when we used to fish with sticks in a
pond by the cross-roads for what we called "bunches of grapes!" The grapes
were little balls of jelly with a tiny black spot in each, and we never
guessed that they were really eggs, and that the little black spot in the
slimy covering would one day actually turn into a live, leaping, croaking
frog. If we had had the patience to watch, we should have seen that little
black dot grow and grow, until it seemed to have become a creature almost
all tail, with the head and body still only a tiny ball. By-and-by we
should have seen legs and feet begin to appear, and as the legs grew
longer, the tail become shorter, until it quite disappeared. Meanwhile,
other changes which we could not see would have taken place; instead of the
gills, which made the tadpole a water-breather, Master Froggie would have
acquired lungs, like any land animal; the aquatic would have changed into
an aerial, the herbivorous into a carnivorous creature, so that we may well
say it has lived two lives.
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