392 Notes on the Natural History of the Scorpion. 



first exhibition of their carnivorous instincts would be the car- 

 nage which would ensue after the mother's moult, with their 

 consequent dispersion. 



There are one or two known facts in the natural history of 

 the scorpion that must not be overlooked in ascribing the des- 

 truction of the progeny to the parent, or to the ravenous appe- 

 tite of the young preying one upon the other. In taking the 

 insects on which it feeds, it seizes them with its pincers, and 

 then it breaks them up into smashes, as I understand the words of 

 Dufour, " qu'ils broient entierement," and in this way feeds upon 

 them by piecemeal. This would imply that we must look for 

 that which was indigestible or that which would resist crushing. 

 Wolkamer, in his experiments with scorpions and spiders when 

 opposed to each other in fight, represents the scorpion as sting- 

 ing its adversary to death, and then sucking the spider, after 

 it had torn off all its legs. My own experience of a scorpion 

 in a bottle, fed with cockroaches (Orthoptera, Blatta), would 

 warrant me in saying they left nothing, in one or two instances, 

 only the outer wing cases, the tegmina. The legs were all de- 

 voured, not sucked and then thrown away, as we clean the 

 flesh of a crab's claw, and cast away the shell. The hundred 

 scorpions that Maupertuis put together in a glass, scarce came 

 into contact before they exerted their rage in mutual destruc- 

 tion ; nothing was to be seen but universal carnage ; there 

 was no distinction — right and left, it was death. Fourteen only 

 were living in a few days ; the rest had been killed and de- 

 voured. The female scorpion which he had confined, big with 

 young, in a glass vessel, was seen to devour her young as fast 

 as they were excluded from the matrix, saving only one, which 

 took refuge on the back of the parent, and after a time killed 

 the old one. He says nothing about eating it when killed, or 

 sucking it to death. As the driving a scorpion to extremity 

 will lead it to destroy itself, the dead parent in the same glass 

 with the living young one proves nothing if it was not eaten. 

 In Redi's experiment with gravid females, that after a few 



