54 GENERATION OF INSECTS 



and Aristotle only eleven, but as many as thirty-eight 

 young scorpions, well-formed and of milk-white color, 

 that changed to a rusty red, and on the sixth day of the 

 same month another female, enclosed in another vessel, 

 brought forth twenty-seven young of the same color as 

 the first. The young behaved in the same manner, re- 

 maining attached to the back and the belly of the mother. 

 They were alive up to the nineteenth day, but from that 

 time they began to die, and only two were alive on the 

 twenty-fourth day of August, after which they were also 

 found dead. In the meanwhile, in order to ascertain 

 how the insects were placed in the abdomen of the mother 

 before birth, I cut open several females and found that 

 there were never less than twenty-four nor more than 

 forty young inside. These were all united in a row, and 

 covered with an almost invisible membrane, through 

 which the scorpions could be distinctly seen, each one 

 being separated from the other by a very fine thread, a 

 thickening, as it were, of the membrane itself. On this 

 occasion I perceived that there was no truth in the re- 

 ports of Aristotle and A. Caristio that the mothers are 

 killed by the newborn young, nor, as Pliny relates, that 

 the young are all killed by the mother, with the exception 

 of one more clever than the rest, who runs up on his 

 mother's back out of reach of her sting, and afterwards 

 avenges his brothers' death by killing his parent. I took 

 pains to verify Rodio's statement concerning a second 

 litter following the first in a short time, but I did not 

 succeed in observing anything further, nor, on opening 

 the bellies of some pregnant females, did I see anything 

 but the usual string of white scorpions. Still it is not 

 impossible that the females had already brought forth 



