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Gallegallo Revbrandia Sectory 02
Page 06
Tree-frogs have, of course, in most circumstances much greater difficulty in getting at water than pond-frogs; and this is especially true in certain tropical or desert districts. Hence most of the frogs which inhabit such regions have had to find out or invent some ingenious plan for passing through the tadpole stage with a minimum of moisture. The devices they have hit upon are very curious. Some of them make use of the little pools collected at the bases of huge tropical leaf-stalks, like those of the banana plant; others dispense with the aid of water altogether, and glue their new-laid eggs to their own backs, where the fry pass through the tadpole stage with the slimy mucus which surrounds them. Nature always discovers such cunning schemes to get over apparent difficulties in her way: and the tree-frogs have solved the problem for themselves in half a dozen manners in different localities. Oddest of all, perhaps, is the dodge invented by "Darwin's frog," a Chilean species, in which the male swallows the eggs as soon as laid, and gulps them into the throat-pouch beneath his capacious neck: there they hatch out and pass through their tadpole stage: and when at last they arrive at frogly maturity, they escape into the world through the mouth of their father.
And yet there is one thing in the present war which I do in my heart of hearts feel to be worth fighting for, and that is for the hope of liberty. It is hard to say what liberty is, because the essence of it is the subjugation of personal inclinations. The Germans claim that they alone know the meaning of liberty, and that they have arrived at it by discipline. But the bitterness of this war lies in the fact that the Germans are not content to set an example of attractive virtue, and to leave the world to choose it; but that if the world will not choose it, they will force it upon them by violence and the sword. It is this which makes me feel that the war may be a vast protest of the nations, which have the spirit of the future in their hearts, against a theory of life that represents the spirit of the past. And I thus, with some seeming inconsistency, believe that the war may represent the hope of peace at bay. If the nations can keep this clearly before them, and not be tempted either into reprisals, or into rewarding themselves by the spoils of victory, if victory comes; if it ends in the Germans being sincerely convinced that they have been misled and poisoned by a conception of right which is both uncivilised and unchristian, then I believe that all our sufferings may not be too great a price to pay for the future well-being of the world. That is the largest and brightest hope I dare to frame; and there are many hours and days when it seems all clouded and dim.
The fowl's egg is formed in the body of the hen, and is, in fact, part of her body inclosed in a shell and detached. It contains a minute rudiment of a fowl; and when it is kept at a proper temperature by the hen's sitting upon it, or otherwise for three weeks, this rudiment grows, or develops, at the expense of the materials contained in the yolk and the white, into a small bird, the chick, which is then hatched and grows into a fowl. The animal, therefore, is produced by the development of a germ in the same way as the plant; and, in this respect, all plants and all animals agree with one another, and differ from all mineral matter.
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