68 GENERATION OF INSECTS 



General of the Tunisian forces, sent a large number of 

 strange animals from Africa to my Lord the Grand 

 Duke. Among these there was a tigress with a new- 

 born cub. On the way to Florence the good tigress, 

 whether playfully or in anger I know not, tried her teeth 

 on the cub and neatly broke off a paw and the attached 

 shoulder, which she swallowed greedily, although there 

 was other meat in the cage. Cats, on being castrated, 

 sometimes devour their own testicles, and females of their 

 kind eat up their newborn young. The pike, fierce in 

 pursuit of prey, does not spare his fellows ; indeed, these 

 fish pursue each other most greedily; and it often hap- 

 pens that a pike of seven or eight pounds will attack 

 one of three or four pounds. It is curious to watch the 

 larger fish struggle to swallow the smaller one, which 

 often sticks out of his mouth a hand's breadth, and for 

 an hour or so the victor will swim about in the water 

 in this way until the head of the swallowed fish enters 

 the stomach of the other, and becomes gradually disinte- 

 grated and absorbed, making room for the rest of the 

 body, which eventually slips in. 



I enclosed other spiders, both male and female, in 

 glass jars, but did not observe anything except their ex- 

 traordinary capability of living long without food. I 

 also noticed that one of the spiders, after a month's im- 

 prisonment, shed his entire skin, that looked exactly like 

 another spider ; another waited fifty days before shedding 

 his. I am not the first to notice this peculiarity, which 

 was alluded to by the learned Englishman, Thomas 

 Moufet, in his celebrated work on insects, where he as- 

 serts that they not only shed their skin once a year, but 

 even every month; this I would dare neither to afiirm 

 nor to deny, not having seen it. I thoroughly examined 



