Toad in the hole

摘要

By victorian times, entombed toads had become a simmering controversy that refused to go away, rather like psychic phenomena or UFOs today. Predictably, the media leapt on each new example: the living toad discovered 2 metres down in bedrock beneath a cellar in Stamford, or the one found embedded in a block of limestone, 8 metres below ground, during the excavation of Hartlepool waterworks. Even Scientific American ran a story about a silver miner called Moses Gaines who came across a tiny but plump toad lodged in a boulder. It was all too much for the scientific establishment. When a live frog, allegedly released from a lump of coal mined in Monmouthshire, was shown at the 1862 International Exhibition in London, the letters pages of The Times were filled with furious demands for its removal.