As a matter of fact, nobody ever makes larger allowances for other people, in the estimate of their veracity, than the scientific inquirer.  Knowing himself, by painful experience, how extremely difficult a matter it is to make perfectly sure you have observed anything on earth quite correctly, and have eliminated all possible chances of error, he acquires the fixed habit of doubting about one-half of whatever his fellow-creatures tell him in ordinary conversation, without for a single moment venturing to suspect them of deliberate untruthfulness.  Children and servants, if they find that anything they have been told is erroneous, immediately jump at the conclusion that the person who told them meant deliberately to deceive them; in their own simple and categorical fashion they answer plumply, ‘That’s a lie.’  But the man of science is only too well acquainted in his own person with the exceeding difficulty of ever getting at the exact truth.  He has spent hours of toil, himself, in watching and observing the behaviour of some plant, or animal, or gas, or metal; and after repeated experiments, carefully designed to exclude all possibility of mistake, so far as he can foresee it, he at last believes he has really settled some moot point, and triumphantly publishes his final conclusions in a scientific journal.  Ten to one, the very next number of that same journal contains a dozen supercilious letters from a dozen learned and high-salaried professors, each pointing out a dozen distinct and separate precautions which the painstaking observer neglected to take, and any one of which would be quite sufficient to vitiate the whole body of his observations.  There might have been germs in the tube in which he boiled the water (germs are very fashionable just at present); or some of the germs might have survived and rather enjoyed the boiling; or they might have adhered to the under surface of the cork; or the mixture might have been tampered with during the experimenter’s temporary absence by his son, aged ten years (scientific observers have no right, apparently, to have sons of ten years old, except perhaps for purposes of psychological research); and so forth, ad infinitum.  And the worst of it all is that the unhappy experimenter is bound himself to admit that every one of the objections is perfectly valid, and that he very likely never really saw what with perfect confidence he thought and said he had seen.

This being an unbelieving age, then, when even the book of Deuteronomy is ‘critically examined,’ let us see how much can really be said for and against our old friend, the toad-in-a-hole; and first let us begin with the antecedent probability, or otherwise, of any animal being able to live in a more or less torpid condition, without air or food, for any considerable period of time together.