Peripheral Visions

taxi.
    And I began to worry. What would a two-year-old, waking up to find her mother gone and a toad sitting beside her bed, surely conclude? What price Piaget? What price Kafka.
    A phone call from the airport woke Barkev up to move the toad away from the bedside so it could be produced later in the day, and confusion was averted. But I have wondered since whether I should have left well enough alone. Perhaps the transmutation of mother into toad might have conveyed a significant truth, a lesson rather than a trauma. Toads are quite close to human beings, after all. Not so close as the primates, of course, or even as a sheep. Not what you might call first or second cousins, but perhaps what large southern families call kissing cousins. The frog prince is much more plausible than man into cockroach.
    In 1990, a colleague at George Mason University, Harold Morowitz, was involved in a first major conference to consider the significance of crashing populations of amphibians—frogs, toads, salamanders—around the world. Observations had been trickling in from herpetologists (amphibians are studied by the same experts who study reptiles), each one noting a drop in the population of a particular species in a particular ecosystem: fewer tree frogs in the Costa Rican cloud forest, a muting of peepers in Connecticut suburbs, a dearth of toads in the Himalayas. It was no easy matter to connect these observations as part of a single pattern, for herpetologists, like anthropologists, are territorial creatures, and each one had a specific hypothesis to explain the trend in his marsh or her stream. They are no doubt still debating the details, but the trend seems to make sense only in global terms, for it has been observed far from construction or factories or toxic dumps. The most likely cause is the increased ultraviolet radiation in sunlight, but the increased acidity of the rain or the dissemination of highly stable and lethal manufactured molecules could also have worldwide effects. Perhaps all of these have combined.
    Frogs and toads, because they live in both air and water, and because of the relative permeability of their skin through which, in addition to gills or lungs, they take in oxygen, may be especially sensitive to environmental change. Because of their similarity to humankind, they have been compared to canaries in a mine shaft, a kind of analog computer registering the implications of changes for other vertebrates, but at a higher degree of sensitivity. We can look at amphibians and wonder about ourselves.
    There is another kind of similarity between amphibians and human beings, a long period of barely protected development. There are many solutions in different species to the problem of how the zygote formed when sperm and ovum meet is to be protected through the stages of development until it can survive on its own. In mammals, the crucial steps take place inside the mother’s body, followed by a period of adult care; baby birds go through their early development protected by hard shells, and butterflies go through their complex metamorphoses protected by cocoons. But the amphibians start out encased only in a moist, soft jelly, then go unprotected through the dramatic changes familiar in the transition from polliwog to frog, growing limbs, absorbing tails. These are all changes that humans go through in the shelter of the womb. You can visualize the vulnerability involved when you recall the impact of thalidomide when it was introduced into the protected internal environment.
    Among the mammals, human beings emerge from the shelter of the maternal body least able to function independently and require the longest period of adult care, not only developing physically but also learning the distinctively human patterns of survival. It has been argued that one of the trends in human evolution has been a reduction in post-partum physical development, by a sort of lowering of the physical standards of maturity: less body hair, less heavy brow ridges, slighter secondary differences between males and females. This trend is referred to as neoteny and may be an essential part of the continuing flexibility that underlies adult learning, for we are not only naked apes but, throughout our lives, infantile apes, learning and sensitive. The wrench of letting children go to determine their own lives is a recognition that they are not yet mature and perhaps never will be.
    The analogy of toad to human includes the recognition