close
quarters that no such hole, or crack, or passage had been dexterously
closed up, with intent to deceive, by plaster, cement, or other
artificial composition? Did you ever offer the workmen who found it a
nominal reward--say five shillings--for the first perfectly unanswerable
specimen of a genuine unadulterated antediluvian toad? Have you got the
toad now present, and can you produce him here in court (on writ of
_habeas corpus_ or otherwise), together with all the fragments of the
stone or tree from which he was extracted? These are the disagreeable,
prying, inquisitorial, I may even say insulting, questions with which a
modern man of science is ready to assail the truthful and reputable
gentlemen who venture to assert their discovery, in these degenerate
days, of the ancient and unsophisticated toad-in-a-hole.

Now, the worst of it is that the gentlemen in question, being unfamiliar
with what is technically described as scientific methods of
investigation, are very apt to lose their temper when thus
cross-questioned, and to reply, after the fashion usually attributed to
the female mind, with another question, whether the scientific person
wishes to accuse them of downright lying. And as nothing on earth could
be further from the scientific person's mind than such an imputation, he
is usually fain in the end to give up the social pursuit of postprandial
natural history (the subject generally crops up about the same time as
the after-dinner coffee), and to let the prehistoric toad go on his own
triumphant way, unheeded.

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