go JUNGLE ISLAND 



All these boyhood memories came back to me 

 on one of my first days in the jungle when Blanco 

 found a number of half-grown scorpions in a log 

 he was chopping for firewood. He supposed I 

 knew nothing about them and explained kindly 

 and carefully, ''Malo, malo — muchomalo," which 

 I guessed to mean, "Bad, bad — very bad." 

 Then, for fear I still did not understand, he 

 pinched one finger between his teeth, then held 

 the bitten finger with his other hand while his 

 face took on a look of great pain and he said in 

 his difficult Enghsh, ' ' Bite-a-you-bad ! ' ' Such an 

 elaborate warning must have seemed to him quite 

 enough for any sensible person, and he was much 

 concerned for me when I ran over to examine the 

 inch-long black animals and picked up with my 

 long forceps as many as I could find to put away 

 in glass jars for study. 



The scorpions are relatives of spiders, but they 

 do not look much like them. The scorpion has 

 a long, jointed "tail" armed at the end with a 

 sting (Fig. 40). The sting is made of two parts — 

 a sharp spine at the tip of the tail for piercing its 

 victim and just under this an opening from which 

 poison flows into the wound made by the spine. 

 Its front pair of legs has grown into great 

 pinching claws like those a crayfish uses so well. 



In the daytime scorpions rest in dark places 

 like the log where Blanco found them. At night 

 they go out to hunt their prey. Their long 



