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Still, there are a great many ways in which it is quite conceivable that
toads might get into holes in rocks or trees so as to give rise to the
common stories about them, and might even manage to live there for a
considerable time with very small quantities of food or air. It must be
remembered that from the very nature of the conditions the hole can
never be properly examined and inspected until after it has been split
open and the toad has been extracted from it. Now, if you split open a
tree or a rock, and find a toad inside it, with a cavity which he
exactly fills, it is extremely difficult to say whether there was or was
not a fissure before you broke the thing to pieces with your hatchet or
pickaxe. A very small fissure indeed would be quite sufficient to
account for the whole delusion; for if the toad could get a little air
to breathe slowly during his torpid period, and could find a few dead
flies or worms among the water that trickled scantily into his hole, he
could manage to drag out a peaceful and monotonous existence almost
indefinitely. Here are a few possible cases, any one of which will
quite suffice to give rise to at least as good a toad-in-the-hole as
ninety-nine out of a hundred published instances.

An adult toad buries himself in the mud by a dry pond, and gets coated
with a hard solid coat of sun-baked clay. His nodule is broken open with
a spade, and the toad himself is found inside, almost exactly filling
the space within the cavity. He has only been there for a few months at
the outside; but the clay is as hard as a stone, and to the bucolic mind
looks as if it might have been there ever since the Deluge. Good blue
lias clay, which dries as solid as limestone, would perform this trick
to perfection; and the toad might easily be relegated accordingly to the
secondary ages of geology. Observe, however, that the actual toads so
found are not the geological toads we should naturally expect under such
remarkable circumstances, but the common everyday toads of modern
England. This shows a want of accurate scientific knowledge on the part
of the toads which is truly lamentable. A toad who really wished to
qualify himself for the post ought at least to avoid presenting himself
before a critical eye in the foolish guise of an embodied anachronism.
He reminds one of the Roman mother in a popular burlesque, who suspects
her son of smoking, and vehemently declares that she smells tobacco,
but, after a moment, recollects the historical proprieties, and mutters
to herself, apologetically, ‘No, not tobacco; that’s not yet invented.’
A would-be silurian or triassic toad ought, in like manner, to remember
that in the ages to whose honours he aspires his own amphibian kind was
not yet developed. He ought rather to come out in the character of a
ceratodus or a labyrinthodon.

Again, another adult toad crawls into the hollow of a tree, and there
hibernates. The bark partially closes over the slit by which he entered,
but leaves a little crack by which air can enter freely. The grubs in
the bark and other insects supply him from time to time with a frugal
repast. There is no good reason why, under such circumstances, a placid
and contented toad might not manage to prolong his existence for several
consecutive seasons.

Once more, the spawn of toads is very small, as regards the size of the
individual eggs, compared with the size of the full-grown animal.
Nothing would be easier than for a piece of spawn or a tiny tadpole to
be washed into some hole in a mine or cave, where there was sufficient
water for its developement, and where the trickling drops brought down
minute objects of food, enough to keep up its simple existence. A toad
brought up under such peculiar circumstances might pass almost its
entire life in a state of torpidity, and yet might grow and thrive in
its own sleepy vegetative fashion.