than the utmost
efforts of our modern psychological advertisers.

Having crossed unconsciously by such a slender etymological bridge
from my jungle tadpole to China, it occurs to me that the Chinese are
the most positively thigmotactic people in the world. I have walked
through block after block of subterranean catacombs, beneath city
streets which were literally packed full of humanity, and I have seen
hot mud pondlets along the Min River wholly eclipsed by shivering
Chinamen packed sardinewise, twenty or thirty in layers, or radiating
like the spokes of a great wheel which has fallen into the mud.

From my brood of Short-tailed Blacks, a half-dozen tadpoles wandered
off now and then, each scum-mumbling by himself. Shortly his
positivism asserted itself and back he wriggled, twisting in and out
of the mass of his fellows, or at the approach of danger nuzzling into
the dead leaves at the bottom, content only with the feeling of
something pressing against his sides and tail. His physical make-up,
simple as it is, has proved perfectly adapted to this touch system of
life: flat-bottomed, with rather narrow, paddle-shaped tail-fins
which, beginning well back of the body, interfere in no way with the
pollywog's instincts, he can thigmotact to his heart's content. His
eyes are also adapted to looking upward, discerning dimly dangers
from above, and whatever else catches the attention of a bottom-loving
pollywog. His mouth is well below, as best suits bottom mumbling.

Compared with these _polloi_ pollywogs, Redfins were as hummingbirds
to quail. Their very origin was unique; for while the toad tadpoles
wriggled their way free from egg gelatine deposited in the water
itself, the Redfins were literally rained down. Within a folded leaf
the parents left the eggs--a leaf carefully chosen as overhanging a
suitable ditch, or pit, or puddle. If all signs of weather and season
failed and a sudden drought set in, sap would dry, leaf would shrivel,
and the pitiful gamble for life of the little jungle frogs would be
lost; the spoonful of froth would collapse bubble by bubble, and,
finally, a thin dry film on the brown leaf would in turn vanish, and
Guinevere and her companions would never have been.

But untold centuries of unconscious necessity have made these
tree-frogs infallible weather prophets, and the liberating rain soon
sifted through the jungle foliage. In the streaming drops which
funneled from the curled leaf, tadpole a