The Toad in the Stone
The toad in the stone waited,
waited all alone . . . still
as the rush of years abated.
Those who poured the rock around him
passed on and under their own stones,
became no more than bones,
then . . . nothing
while the toad lay waiting,
suspended,
unblinking,
frozen in the rock,
unthinking.
Then,
to the sound of empires rumbling,
the rock from ‘round the toad came crumbling
in the unsoft dawn of war.
Exposed,
the waiting toad blinked,
withered,
and was no more.
British writers of the 19th century frequently relied upon the belief that animals, frogs or toads in particular, were sometimes found alive after being encased in solid rock, coal, or wood. For instance, in “Lallah Rookh” (1817) Thomas Moore intimated that “the wretch” may bear the loss of pleasure, hopes, and affections
ReplyDelete… and yet live on,
Like things, within the cold rock found
Alive, when all’s congealed around.
In “Shirley” (1849) Charlotte Brontë lamented that women who sewed all day fell into “a black trance, like the toad’s, buried in marble.”
Dante Gabriel Rossetti gave a more extended simile in his 1870 poem about a prostitute, “Jenny”:
Like a toad within a stone
Seated while Time crumbles on;
Which sits there since the earth was cursed
For man’s transgression at the first;
Which, living through all centuries,
Not once has seen the sun arise;
Whose life, to its cold circle charmed,
The earth’s whole summers have not warmed;
Which always – whitherso the stone
Be flung – sits there, deaf, blind, alone;
Aye, and shall not be driven out
Till that which shuts him round about
Break at the very Master’s stroke,
And the dust thereof vanish as smoke,
And the seed of Man vanish as dust –
Even so within this world is Lust.
Jan Bondeson reported in 2007 in the “Fortean Times” that a couple of hundred cases of the phenomenon had been described in Europe, North America, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand since the 15th century. In 1761 Henri III’s physician Ambroise Paré claimed that he “found a huge toad, full of life” inside a stone near Meudon and that the quarryman who accompanied him said “it was not the first time he had met with a toad and the like creatures within huge blocks of stone." Benjamin Franklin reported that in 1782 four living toads had been found at Passy: “The part of the rock where they were found, is at least fifteen feet below its surface, and is a kind of limestone. A part of it is filled with ancient sea-shells, and other marine substances. If these animals have remained in this confinement since the formation of the rock, they are probably some thousands of years old.” During the 1820s English geologist William Buckland put toads of different sizes and ages into carved chambers within limestone and sandstone blocks, which he buried in his garden. A year later, he dug up them up and found that most of them had decayed decayed, but a few, that had been in the limestone, were still living. Buckland reburied them in the limestone for another year, but they were all dead when he disinterred them. Buckland concluded that toads could not survive inside rock for extreme lengths of time and determined that reports of the entombed animal phenomenon were mistaken. But in 1865 the “Hartlepool Free Press” reported that excavators working on a block of magnesium limestone taken from about 25 feet underground discovered a cavity within the stone that contained a live toad. “The cavity was no larger than its body and presented the appearance of being a cast of it. The toad's eyes shone with unusual brilliancy, and it was full of vivacity on its liberation. It appeared, when first discovered, desirous to perform the process of respiration, but evidently experienced some difficulty, and the only sign of success consisted of a 'barking' noise, which it continues to make invariably at present on being touched. The toad is in the possession of Mr. S. Horner, the president of the Natural History Society, and continues in as lively a state as when found. On a minute examination of its mouth is found to be completely closed, and the barking noise it makes proceeds from its nostrils. The claws of its fore feet are turned inwards, and its hind ones are of extraordinary length and unlike the present English toad. The toad, when first released, was of a pale colour and not readily distinguished from the stone, but shortly after its colour grew darker until it became a fine olive brown." The “Uitenhage Times” of South Africa in 1876 reported that timbermen found 68 toads in the middle of a tree trunk that was 16-ft (5 m) wide; each was about the size of a grape: "They were of a light brown, almost yellow color, and perfectly healthy, hopping about and away as if nothing had happened. All about them was solid yellow wood, with nothing to indicate how they could have got there, how long they had been there, or how they could have lived without food, drink, or air." In 1901 Charles Dawson gave to the Brighton and Hove Natural History and Philosophical Society a “toad in the hole” which he claimed two workmen had found in a flint nodule in a quarry near Lewes. (In 1912 Dawson informed the British Natural History Museum’s keeper of geology that he had found the “missing link’ between ape and man in Pleistocene gravel beds near Piltdown, East Sussex. The remains were given the Latin name Eoanthropus dawsoni ["Dawson's dawn-man"]; it was not until 1953 that the bones actually consisted of the altered mandible and some teeth of an orangutan deliberately combined with the cranium of a fully developed, though small-brained, modern human.)
ReplyDelete