tune, Pan, and St. Vitus. Gently
shunted into a glass jar, these surprising tads accepted the new
environment with quiet philosophy; and when I reached the laboratory
and transferred them again, they dignifiedly righted themselves in the
swirling current, and hung in mid-aquarium, waiting--forever waiting.

It was difficult to think of them as tadpoles, when the word brought
to mind hosts of little black wrigglers filling puddles and swamps of
our northern country. These were slow-moving, graceful creatures,
partly transparent, partly reflecting every hue of the spectrum, with
broad, waving scarlet and hyaline fins, and strange, fish-like mouths
and eyes. Their habits were as unpollywoglike as their appearance. I
visited their micaceous pool again and again; and if I could have
spent days instead of hours with them, no moment of ennui would have
intervened.

My acquaintanceship with tadpoles in the past had not aroused me to
enthusiasm in the matter of their mental ability; as, for example, the
inmates of the next aquarium to that of the Redfins, where I kept a
herd or brood or school of Short-tailed Blacks--pollywogs of the Giant
Toad (_Bufo marinus_). At earliest dawn they swam aimlessly about and
mumbled; at high noon they mumbled and still swam; at midnight they
refused to be otherwise occupied. It was possible to alarm them; but
even while they fled they mumbled.

In bodily form my Redfins were fish, but mentally they had advanced a
little beyond the usual tadpole train of reactions, reaching forward
toward the varied activities of the future amphibian. One noticeable
thing was their segregation, whether in the mica pools, or in two
other smaller ones near by, in which I found them. Each held a pure
culture of Redfins, and I found that this was no accident, but aided
and enforced by the tads themselves. Twice, while I watched them, I
saw definite pursuit of an alien pollywog,--the larva of the
Scarlet-thighed Leaf-walker (_Phyllobates inguinalis_),--which fled
headlong. The second time the attack was so persistent that the lesser
tadpole leaped from the water, wriggled its way to a damp heap of
leaves, and slipped down between them. For tadpoles to take such
action as this was as reasonable as for an orchid to push a fellow
blossom aside on the approach of a fertilizing hawk-moth. This
momentary co-operation, and the concerted elimination of the undesired
tadpole, affected me as the thought of the first consciou