14 West American Scientist. 



On the stone floor of the kitchen attached to my office, i 

 arranged a circle of burning sticks about three yards in circum- 

 ference, the sticks being so placed that there were no means of 

 exit through the fire. It was not intense, but small and quite 

 bearable as regards heat within a few inches, so that the central 

 part of the circle was perfectly cool. Into this center I accord- 

 ingly dropped my scorpion, who, on reaching terra firma, darted 

 off in a great hurry, only to be quickly brought to a halt on 

 reaching within a few inches of the periphery of the circle. After 

 a short pause of reflection, he deviated to the right, and ran once 

 completely round the circle as near to the fire as it was prudent 

 to venture. This he did three times, often approaching the burn- 

 ing sticks quite closely in his anxious endeavors to escape. In 

 about a quarter of an hour, finding his efforts were useless, he 

 retired almost into the exact center of the circle, and there, in a 

 tragic manner raised his tail till the sting or spur was close to his 

 head, gave himself two deliberate prods in the back of the neck, 

 and thus miserably perished. As I placed the body of the 

 suicide in a bottle of spirits, I almost regretted that I had not 

 let him escape before he had resorted to such an extreme measure. 



My last experience is even more curious than the preceeding, 

 and it shows a remarkable provision of nature that is almost 

 incredible. I was playing a game of billiards in a small village 

 in the Blue Mountains; there was no ceiling to the room, the 

 roof being covered, as is the custom in Jamaica, with cedar wood 

 shingles. My opponent was smoking a large pipe, and suddenly, 

 just as I was about to play a stroke, what I thought was the 

 contents of my friend's pipe fell on the table. Instinctively, I 

 was on the point of brushing it off with my hand, when, to my 

 amazement, I saw it was a moving mass, which, on closer inspec- 

 tion, turned out to be a large female scorpion, from which ran 

 away in every direction, a number of perfectly formed little 

 scorpions about a quarter of an inch in length. The mother 

 scorpion soon ended her feeble struggles; the whole of her back 

 had been eaten out by her own oftspring, of which we killed the 

 astonishing number of thirty-eight. They had not only been 

 carried by their parent, but they had lived on her, cleaning out 

 her body from the shell of her back, so that she looked like an 

 inverted cooked crab from which the edible portions have been 

 removed. She had clung to her retreat m the shingled roof 

 until near the approach of death, when she had fallen and given 

 us this curious spectacle. I was told by the attendant that the 

 young scorpions always live thus at the expense of their mother's 

 life, and that by the time her strength is exhausted, they are 

 ready to shift for themselves. — Land and Water. 



At a white heat copper passes off into vapor, which burns in the 

 air with a green flame. 



