Horned Toad

Misshapen and frayed as a badly done potato pancake, the old horned toad that lugubriously blinked in the Eastland, Tex., drugstore window last week proved all the lies that Texans had ever told of Nature's antics in their state. The reptile had lived for 31 years in the sealed hollow of the local courthouse cornerstone. So averred honest men who had just dug it out, and one remembered having planned to put a horned toad in the stone at its laying 31 years ago. The idea then, and even now, in Texas is that a horned toad can live 100 years without food, water, air or company. At such a legend scientists scoff.

A horned toad is not a toad, nor a frog. It is a lizard, a reptile, which through the ages has developed a broad, squat, warty body. It looks like a batrachian, save for its short, sharp tail. Horned toads run; they do not hop. They breathe by means of lungs, not through the skin. Frogs and regular toads can breathe through the skin. Horned toads (i.e. lizards) are of a higher form of life than are batrachians.

And that is why scientists, save for Dr. William Temple Hornaday, for 30 years director of the New York Zoological Garden, disbelieved the story of the Eastland horned toad. It might have lived, the questioned authorities say, one, two or even five years within the sealing of the stone, but never a human generation.

Against this array and fortified with an amusing non-sequitur, Naturalist Hornaday went with his story:

"It is possible. I recall an incident in my own experience which seems to confirm it. I was in Ceylon, digging for elephant bones and tusks in sand which was packed so hard it had almost the consistency of rock. So far as could be observed that layer of sand had been lying there a thousand years. In this impermeable mass about two feet beneath the surface, we uncovered a frog [sic, sic] which was absolutely entombed there. Fortunately it escaped spades and pickaxes and was lifted out alive. Its stomach was full of water which it ejected and then hopped away."

That was a very brave story for Dr. Hornaday to revive and it gave narrative confidence to a plain & ordinary Texan, one George Henkel, Dallas taxidermist. Said he without winking, thinking or drinking:

"I know more about horned toads, I reckon, than any man in Texas, both inside and out. I have mounted everything from a humming bird to a Texas steer with horns eight feet long from tip to tip.

"Thirty years ago I opened an office at Waco, when horned toads were so plentiful that boys were selling them for five cents each. I conceived the idea of mounting a few of the larger specimens and using them for pen racks.

"When I got hold of a big bull horned toad one day I saturated a rag with chloroform and held it under his nose long enough to have killed a bulldog.

"Well, sir, in place of that toad going to sleep, it reared up on its hind legs and wanted to fight me.

"I put him in a cigar box and saturated cotton with a teacupful of chloroform and put that in there with him, and then placed a pound weight on the box lid. The next morning Mr. Toad was gone. He had pulled a Houdini during the night and disappeared.

"A horned toad is nothing more than a little alligator that's been stepped on and mashed flat, and like his forbears that hibernate for months or years at a time, does not bother about the lapse of time.

"Did I ever kill one? I can't say that I did. I stuck a needle through the back of one's neck and as far as I could tell it was dead. I stuffed it and was using it for a pen rack until it began crawling around over the desk, and I finally had to glue it down."