ABSTRACT
Only the traveller knows how Nature's voices - voices of forest and river and plain - vary according to zone; and it is nearly always some local peculiarity of their tone or character that appeals to feeling and penetrates into memory, giving us the sensation of the foreign and the faraway. Outside of love-poems there are hundreds of verses about the common frogs of ponds or rice-fields. Some refer chiefly to the volume of the sound that the frogs make: Hearing the frogs of the rice-fields, methinks that the water sings. In various countries of which the peoples appear strange to us, by reason of beliefs, ideas, customs and arts having nothing in common with our own, there can be found something in the nature of the land - something in its flora or fauna - characterised by a corresponding strangeness.
