148 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



generally held to be poisonous, these charming little lizards are really 

 quite harmless. Hottentots have a great dread of the getje, believing 

 that if it bites them, they will live just long enough to reach home, 

 01 at most till sundown. 



Among this miscellaneous collection is a wasp (Mutilla), of which 

 I have found some twelve or fourteen kinds. The males are winged, 

 as usual with wasps, but the females are wingless. She has a red 

 thorax and a yellow-spotted hairy abdomen. She runs very quickly 

 among the karoo bushes, and, if alarmed, hides under them or buries 

 herself in the loose hot sand at their roots. She has to be handled 

 carefully, as she has a very powerful sting. She also stridulates, no 

 doubt a call to her flying mate who, by the way, cannot sting. I have 

 found only three males (one dead in a Stegodyphus nest), but the 

 males are very rare. I do not know why the females are wingless and 

 the sexes so different in appearance. But the same thing occurs with 

 some grasshoppers; I have one kind particularly in my mind, the 

 female of which is dark, huge and heavy, with only rudimentary wings, 

 while the male is small, slight, smart, brick red and a splendid flyer. 

 The variety of grasshoppers and ants here is extraordinary, and the 

 protective shapes and colors are most wonderful. Such protective 

 devices are, of course, quite a feature of the fauna of the bare and 

 stony karoo; but no one who had not seen them could believe how 

 efficacious they are. Even a trained eye may lose an insect while look- 

 ing at it. 



Passing on to scorpions, the four species found here embrace three 

 genera. One kind (Opisthophthahnus austerus), a burrower, is very 

 common; one may catch fifty almost any day. They grow to six or 

 seven inches in length and are pugnacious and poisonous. Most 

 Opisthophthalmi dig holes from one to two feet deep, sometimes but not 

 generally under stones, with the opening oval-shaped like a human 

 eye; but 0. austerus here is, as far as my experience goes, invariably 

 found under stones by day, sometimes with only a shallow burrow 

 under the stone, at other times with a burrow ending in a hole which 

 varies in depth, often not being deep enough to hide the scorpion. 

 When you raise the stone you expose the scorpion, which runs to and 

 fro in its now roofless burrow, and, if it has sunk a hole, eventually dives 

 down into that, sometimes tail first. If you irritate these scorpions, 

 they tilt the hind part of the body forward and up by straightening 

 their hind legs under it; then jerking it quickly and stridulating 

 angrily, they rush at you; and most ugly creatures they are all nip- 

 Tpers and sting. The stridulating sound is produced by rubbing the 

 jaws which are lined with short, stiff, yellow hairs against the front 

 edge of the head-plate. The male closely resembles the female up 



