he
rewarded us by living, which was all we asked.

It is difficult for a diver to express his emotions on paper, and
verbal arguments with a dentist are usually one-sided. So must the
spirit of a tadpole suffer greatly from handicaps of the flesh. A
mumbling mouth and an uncontrollable, flagellating tail, connected by
a pinwheel of intestine, are scant material wherewith to attempt new
experiments, whereon to nourish aspirations. Yet the Redfins, as
typified by Guinevere, have done both, and given time enough, they may
emulate or surpass the achievements of larval axolotls, or the
astounding egg-producing maggots of certain gnats, thus realizing all
the possibilities of froghood while yet cribbed within the lowly
casing of a pollywog.

In the first place Guinevere had ceased being positively thigmotactic,
and, writing as a technical herpetologist, I need add no more. In
fact, all my readers, whether Batrachologists or Casuals, will agree
that this is an unheard-of achievement. But before I loosen the
technical etymology and become casually more explicit, let me hold
this term in suspense a moment, as I once did, fascinated by the sheer
sound of the syllables, as they first came to my ears years ago in a
university lecture. There is that of possibility in being positively
thigmotactic which makes one dread the necessity of exposing and
limiting its meaning, of digging down to its mathematically accurate
roots. It could never be called a flower of speech: it is an over-ripe
fruit rather: heavy-stoned, thin-fleshed--an essentially practical
term. It is eminently suited to its purpose, and so widely used that
my friend the editor must accept it; not looking askance as he did at
my definition of a vampire as a vespertilial anaesthetist, or breaking
into open but wholly ineffectual rebellion, at the past tense of the
verb to candelabra. I admit that the conjugation

I candelabra
You candelabra
He candelabras

arouses a ripple of confusion in the mind; but it is far more
important to use words than to parse them, anyway, so I acclaim
perfect clarity for "The fireflies candelabraed the trees!"

Not to know the precise meaning of being positively thigmotactic is a
stimulant to the imagination, which opens the way to an entire essay
on the disadvantages of education--a thought once strongly aroused by
the glorious red-and-gold hieroglyphic signs of the Peking
merchants--signs which have always thrilled me more