100 YEARS AGO

I should be obliged by your inserting the following experience if you think it remarkable. Yesterday we killed an adder (?) here, about 38 inches long; and seeing that he had made a meal evidently some little time before, out of curiosity we opened him, and extracted a large toad, which was about half-way down the snake's interior, or about 18 inches. The toad, whose head was much wider than the snake's, and whose body was many times as large as his enemy's head, we of course all thought must be dead; and we laid him on a flowerbed, wondering how he could have got inside the snake at all, for it certainly seemed a case of the greater being contained in the less. Of course we knew the marvellous stretching powers of a snake's jaws, but this seemed to eclipse them all. As we watched the toad he seemed to move, so we bethought ourselves of trying to revive him, and, after pouring water freely over him, and whisky and water down his throat, we were intensely astonished to see him revive; so much so that he stood up on all-fours, blown out like a balloon, and made a kind of a dart at a stick in the most comical way. Eventually “Jonah,” as we promptly christened him, disappeared amongst the flowers. Can any of your readers quote a like case of resuscitation? Perhaps some of them might be able to afford information as to the probable duration of the toad's entombment. From Nature 11 August 1898.

50 YEARS AGO

For nearly eighty years, one of the most prominent items of anatomical evidence in support of the antiquity of man in Australia has been a fragment of a supposed human molar, found by Krefft in the Wellington Caves of New South Wales. ⃛ Recently, the human origin of the fragment has been questioned by Dr. T. D. Campbell, and I have considered de novo its possible relation to the lower mammals. ⃛ After direct comparison with relevant material, I have no doubt that Krefft's find was derived from the posterior half of the upper fourth premolar or seccator, of the right side, of Macropus (Protemnodon) anak, Owen, a giant Pleistocene ‘wallaby’⃛. From Nature 14 August 1948.