Word: toadding
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...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...
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...
...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...
...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...