Word: eastland
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Ringling's menagerie, President Coolidge received a one-animal menagerie in his office. It came in a goldfish bowl and consisted of a horned toad (Phrynosoma cornutum). Old Rip, the toad's name was, because it was supposed to have been buried in the cornerstone of the Eastland, Tex., court house, for 31 years. That it was still alive, President Coolidge could plainly see. As he discussed its merits with Senator Mayfield and some other Texans, he pointed at it, not with his finger, but with the bars of his horn-rimmed spectacles. This gesture, observers realized...
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...
...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...
...difficulty with traditions is that in every case sooner or later an attitude of skepticism supplants trusting credulity, and the thirst for accurate knowledge demands facts and demonstration. One may infer that such a desire overtook the inhabitants of Eastland, Texas, thirty years ago, for the tradition that has grown up in the West as to the indestructability of the horned frog was put to the test. A live frog was placed in the cornerstone of the courthouse of Eastland. Now the old structure is to be vacated, the cornerstone will shortly be opened, and opportunity will be granted...