ARE SCORPIONS MATRICIDES AND SUICIDES? 399 



great importance, I resolved to find out the truth through my 

 own experiments, with the following results : 



A few years ago I introduced into a capacious flask a she 

 scorpion with her offspring of fifty little scorpions. They lost 

 no time in regaining their position upon the mother's back, to 

 which they regularly returned every time they were forcibly 

 dislodged. In order to excite the voracity of the little ones, I 

 withdrew all food from their reach, and even mutilated one of 

 the mother's legs. The haemorrhage thus produced failed to give 

 the result hoped for. The fifty little scorpions changed their 



EocK Scorpion. 



skins and subsequently died of hunger. The mother came out 

 unscathed. I repeated the experiment upon a later occasion, in 

 Jamaica, placing together two different breeds upon one mother's 

 back. The weak little scorpions died, as was to be expected, of 

 starvation, and I vainly tried to provoke their voracity with the 

 mother's blood. 



But if science has exonerated scorpions from the horrible 

 crime of matricide, it is by no means so clear that they are en- 

 tirely deprived of the faculty of maiming themselves, and even 

 of making attempts on their own life, an inclination which they 

 possess in common with many other animals. 



The assertion that scorpions, when surrounded by fire and de- 

 prived of all means of escape, commit suicide, was first advanced 

 by Paracelsus. Some naturalists delare this to be a fact, while 

 others deny it. Among the latter we may count Brehm, who. 



