--the limit of the toad's life may be
assumed to be within two years; this period being no doubt capable of
being extended when the animal gains a slight advantage, exemplified
by the admission of air and insect-food. Secondly, we may reasonably
argue that these experiments show that toads when rigorously treated,
like other animals, become starved and meagre, and by no means
resemble the lively, well-fed animals reported as having emerged from
an imprisonment extending, in popular estimation, through periods of
inconceivable duration.

These tales are, in short, as devoid of actual foundation as are the
modern beliefs in the venomous properties of the toad, or the ancient
beliefs in the occult and mystic powers of various parts of its frame
when used in incantations. Shakespeare, whilst attributing to the toad
venomous qualities, has yet immortalized it in his famous simile by
crediting it with the possession of a "precious jewel." But even in
the latter case the animal gets but scant justice; for science strips
it of its poetical reputation, and in this, as in other respects,
shows it, despite fable and myth, to be zooelogically an interesting,
but otherwise a commonplace member of the animal series.

[Illustration]

ON A PIECE OF CHALK

_A LECTURE TO WORKING MEN_.

(Delivered in England.)

BY T.H. HUXLEY.

[Illustration: A CHALK CLIFF.]

If a well were to be sunk at our feet in the midst of the city of
Norwich, the diggers would very soon find themselves at work in that
white substance almost too soft to be called rock, with which we are
all familiar as "chalk."

Not only here, but over the whole county of Norfolk, the well-sinker
might carry his shaft down many hundred feet without coming to the end
of the chalk; and, on the sea-coast, where the waves have pared away
the face of the land which breasts them, the scarped faces of the high
cliffs are often wholly formed of the same material. Northward, the
chalk may be followed as far as Yorkshire; on the south coast it
appears abruptly in the picturesque western bays of Dorset, and breaks
into the Needles of the Isle of Wight; while on the shores of Kent it
supplies that long line of white cliffs to which England owes her name
of Albion.

Were the thin soil which covers it all washed away, a curved band of
white chalk, here broader, and there narrower, might be followed
diagonally across England from Lulworth in Dorset, to Flamborough Head
in Yo