Notes on the Natural History of the Scorpion. 389 



same web till the first moulting, then separate, and stand 

 aloof from one another, and become mutual enemies. Under 

 some circumstances, Latreille tells ns, some scorpions kill and 

 eat their young as soon as they can prey on them, from time to 

 time. Maupertuis having inclosed together the parent with a 

 hundred young ones, found in a short time that they were re- 

 duced to fourteen. 



Doctor Maccary, who has carefully detailed the history of 

 the scorpion, while agreeing with the equally precise facts of 

 Dufour, in representing the two broods of young to be in spring 

 and autumn, only establishes that those are the breeding sea- 

 sons, not that they produce two broods in the year. They take 

 two years to engender, and go through near a year in gestation. 

 Scorpions are comparatively rare. 



"The scorpion girt with fire," stinging itself to death, is 

 generally credited. Maupertuis has combated this opinion, 

 but Monsieur Le Comte de Senneville, the Grand Referendary 

 of the French Chamber of Peers, made trials of the fact in the 

 presence of a great number of persons, and confirmed the 

 popular opinion, " se pique lui-meme et se donne ainsi la mort." 



The fecundated germs of scorpions are placed in particular 

 tubes, and pass from the matrix, when they have reached the 

 period of extrusion. The young are disengaged while the eggs 

 are in their place within the body, and they come forth full- 

 formed from the mother. Monsieur Marcel de Serres carefully 

 observed for a long time the European scorpion, and, though 

 he found the number of eggs ordinarily to be twenty-five or 

 thirty, yet he saw a female extrude forty-nine young ones. 

 Leon Dufour, remarking that the ovigerous tubes of insects are 

 conoid and polysperme, states that the bag (bourse) that con- 

 tains the young is globulous and inonospermal. The uterus 

 has a form not to be seen but in the scorpion. The size of the 

 foetus is so disproportioned to the external opening, and the ex- 

 trudant passage, from its horny consistence, is so little suscepti- 

 ble of dilatation, that this naturalist could not conceive how the 



