so
abnormal.

No one supposes that incarceration in solid rock is an ordinary event in
the life of even a Toad. However it occur,--granting that it may
occur,--it must surely be a rare accident happening to an individual
here and there, from which millions of Toads are exempt. We may
reasonably suppose, too, that not one in a hundred so accidentally
incarcerated would survive, the accident in the majority of cases
proving fatal. If we bear in mind these not unreasonable presumptions,
we shall not hastily decide that all the recorded discoveries of Toads
immured are proved false and impossible, because we have not succeeded
in finding a case of longevity out of four-and-twenty Toads, many of
them little ones, which we took and violently immured at our pleasure.

To my own mind these interesting experiments are far more corroborative
than contradictory of the popular belief. The amazing fact remains, that
an adult vertebrate air-breathing animal can certainly live, and
increase in size, shut up in a stone cell, debarred from light and air
and food, for a period between one and two years! What have we parallel
to this in the whole range of natural history? _C'est le premier pas qui
coute._ After the first year has passed so auspiciously, why may not a
second? a third? and so indefinitely--under circumstances peculiarly
favouring? It is by no means certain that there are not such favouring
circumstances, because we cannot precisely predicate what they are. And
if we admit the reported cases to be--only a few of them--true, we
cannot evade the conclusion, that the longevity of these imprisoned
Toads must be immense, incalculable. For a Toad that emerges when a
block of stone is split up, from a matrix that fits (say somewhat
roughly, if you please) its form and size, must have been there ever
since the stone was in a soft state, how long soever that may have
been. Nor does it in the least affect the question, that there may have
been some minute crack in the matrix through which insects, sufficient
to support life, entered. This circumstance, I say, if satisfactorily
proved, would not touch the question of time. And surely it is a marvel
of colossal magnitude that a vertebrate animal should have maintained
its life shut up in a mass of stone ever since the deposition of the
matter in a solid form, even though we be able to eliminate from it the
element of total abstinence during the entire period.

But facts are upon rec