570 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



MYKIAPODS. 



By MAJOR HOLLAND, E. M. L. I. 



11 ~P)LEASE, sir, here's one of them nasty mischiefull many-legs as 

 J- I told you pisened the melon-bed so as we never got nothink 

 off of 'em. Nobody can't say as they wasn't took care of, for I was a 

 waterin' and a waterin' on 'em mornin', noon, and night, all along the 

 droughty summer. It stands reasonable like tonatur' as water-melons 

 should take a sight o' water ; 'twasn't my overdoin' on 'em with m'ist- 

 ure as rotted the roots off; 'twas these here plaguey varmint ! " 



Having delivered this oration, and proved to his own entire satis- 

 faction " as how he was right all along, and master was mistook " 

 about poor Curcurbita citrullus having been drenched to death with 

 icy pump-water, the obstinate old gardener deposited his writhing 

 scape-goat on the study-table, and retired triumphant to the coach- 

 house, where he whistled loud paeans of victory to the Bramahs and 

 Cochins of the stable-yard. 



What yellow-brown Myriapod is this ? His flexible body, which he 

 is tying into all manner of knots, is composed of no fewer than eighty- 

 one distinct segments, to say nothing of the odd one at the end of the 

 tail, and the five which have coalesced to form the head. If we count 

 these five fused segments as one (as we do the four which Prof. Hux- 

 ley tells us combine together to make up our own human brain-boxes), 

 then his body is made up of eighty-three somites, of which the cephalic, 

 the anterior-thoracic, which bears that terrible pair of hooked maxilli- 

 pedes, and the anal, are the only three presenting any marked differ- 

 ences from each other, and from the eighty others which are as 

 " strictly uniform " as the helmets of the metropolitan police. 



How the fellow shuns the light ! Does his conscience trouble him ? 

 Does he feel himself guilty of " pisenin' " the melons, that he wriggles 

 so uneasily until he succeeds in burying himself out of sight in the silk 

 tassel of the pen-wiper ? A burrowing troglodyte by nature, I suspect, 

 and on closer examination he proves to be such Geophilus subter- 

 raneus (underground earth-lover), of the family Geophilidce, of the 

 subdivision Chilopoda (foot-feeders), of the order Myriapoda ', of the 

 class Articulata, according to Newport. 



He has no eyes; he doesn't want any; he passes his life in the 

 dark, underground, tearing up old shreds of farmyard manure and 

 vegetable matter, always preferring scavengers' work when he can get 

 it, and doing good service by eating up the helpless, soft, succulent 

 larvae of the hosts of insects that prey upon our crops. The sins of 

 the wire-worm have been laid to his charge; his third cousins the Iu- 

 lidce do undoubtedly steal our potato " sets," and bore into young 

 peas, or rather into old peas just " splitting" and about to send up 



