Toads as Medicine

1901

"Out of the queer use of a common creature regarded as most potent in old time medicine there came the most surprising and nearly the most important of inventions," says Harvey Sutherland in Ainslee's.

"Every schoolboy knows that a toad can cause warts or make the cow give bloody milk, but not everybody knows that toads are also powerfully medicinal. It is a fact. Martin Luther says so. These are his very words: 'Experience has proved the toad to be endowed with valuable qualities. If you run a stick through three toads, and, after having dried them in the sun, apply them to any pestilent humor, they draw out the poison, and the malady will disappear.'

"Pope Adrian always carried a bag about his neck containing dried toad, pearl, coral, gum tragacanth, smaragd and other articles of junk. It did him a power of good, he said. It was all that kept him up. And lest you think that they only did that hundreds of years ago, I want to say here that when my father was a boy and suffered from quinsy they used to tie live frogs about his throat. The frogs nearly clawed the hide off. They did not cure the quinsy, but that's a detail."

Dead Snake In Beer Keg

Iowa, 1900

Poisoned Beer Results in the Death of Three Persons

Fort Dodge, July 21. — Four young men living in Cerro Gordo county, near the Minnesota line, purchased and drank from a keg of eastern brewed beer, and as a result three of them have died and the fourth is now in terrible agony and is reported to be at the point of death.

The day was warm and the beer was consumed hurriedly by the friends, who little realized that they were sipping a death dealing draught. They were all immediately taken sick, and although a physician was soon after summoned, the taking off of three of the young men could not be prevented.

To ascertain, if possible, the cause of the sickness, the keg was broken into and the decomposed remains of a genuine rattlesnake were found. Improbable as the story sounds, it is true, and is rendered plausible by the fact that empty kegs are often left lying around for weeks before being shipped back to the breweries. It is thus easy for reptiles and insects to crawl into the kegs.

The scalding out of the kegs upon their return to the brewery would naturally kill any living organism, which would remain in the keg. It was only a few years ago that a party here became sick from drinking keg beer and an investigation showed that a dead toad occupied the keg with the beer.


Lee Junior Stamping State

Robert E. Lee, Jr., grandson of the great Confederate soldier, is taking a prominent part in Virginia's political campaign. He is a son of William H. F. Lee, who has represented the Alexandria district in congress for several terms, and is a young man of considerable culture and oratorical ability.

The Intelligence of Toads

1874

The belief is common in old countries that toads live a hundred years without partaking food, for they have been found in little cavities of rocks, where is no apparent entrance to admit the animal, and hence the theory that the toad must have been there when the rock was formed, or thrown up ages ago. The toad can live a long time on water or moisture alone, as it imbibes it rapidly through its very porous skin; but that it lives thus a hundred years is totally absurd, the most reasonable solution of the problem being that a very small, almost imperceptible crack or opening at the cavity exists, through which an egg of a toad was washed in, and hatched or grew or developed into a fair-sized creature, and there lived and thrived a reasonable time on small insects which now and then crept or drifted in.

The intelligence of a toad is certainly remarkable. When an insect is too large to swallow, it thrusts the creature against a stone to push it down its throat. On one occasion, when a toad was attempting to swallow a locust, the head was down the former's throat, the hinder parts protruding. The toad then sought a stone or clod, but as none was to be found, he lowered his head and crept along, pushing the locust against the ground. But the ground was too smooth (a rolled path), and the angle at which the locust lay to the ground too small, and thus no progress was made. To increase the angle he straightened up his hind legs, but in vain. At length he threw up his hind quarters, and actually stood on his head, or rather on the locust sticking out of his mouth and, after repeating this once or twice, succeeded in getting himself outside his dinner.

On another occasion a toad was seen to dispose of an earthworm, which was so long that it had to be swallowed by sections. But while one end was in the toad's stomach the other end was coiled about his head. He waited until the worm's writhing gave him a chance, and swallowed half an inch; then taking a nip with his jaws, waited for a chance to draw in another half inch. But there were so many half inches to dispose of, that at length his jaws grew tired, lost their firmness of grip, and the worm crawled out five-eighths of an inch between each half-inch swallowing. The toad perceiving this, brought its right hand to his jaws, grasping his abdomen with his foot, and by a little effort got hold of the worm in his stomach from outside; he thus, by his foot, held fast to what he had gained by each swallow, and presently succeeded in getting the worm entirely down.

Toads Valued in France

1925

Toads, the rotund garden variety, have a market value in France. The French gardeners claim that this warty-skinned amphibian devours its weight in injurious plant insects every 24 hours, and is encouraged to live in their gardens. Killing one of these insect hunters in France is considered the height of folly.


Bleaching Beeswax

Beeswax may be bleached by running in thin ribbons through a machine and allowing it to remain in the sunlight. Some beeswax bleaches more readily than others. It will take several weeks to bleach it.


Formation of Grand Bank

The Grand bank of Newfoundland is supposed to be composed of deposits of solid matter brought from the Arctic seas by icebergs, which gradually melt by contact with the warm water of the Gulf stream.


Ranks High in Literature

The Heimskringla has been called "the most important prose work in old Norse literature." It is a history of Norse kings. Some were mythical, others real. The author was an Icelander, Snorri Sturluson (1178-1241).


Mexican Frijol

The word frijol in Spanish connotes almost any variety of cultivated beans, but in Mexico it is applied almost exclusively to the brown or spotted varieties known in English-speaking countries as kidney beans.


Bee's Average Life Six Weeks

A bee hatched in early summer does not live to eat the honey it gathers, as its average life through the busy season is not more than six weeks. Only those born in late autumn live till the spring.

—Bedford Gazette, Bedford, Pennsylvania, August 7, 1925.