104 A NATUBALIST IN CELEBES ch. v 



coming as unbidden guests to my dinner -table. If they 

 had confined their attentions to my sitting-room I might 

 have forgiven them, but the sight of them crawhng up the 

 walls of my bedroom as I lay ill in bed was enough to banish 

 all friendly feeling. Many of them carried a large silken 

 sack of eggs or young ones, and nothing would induce them 

 to let go of this tiU they expired in my collecting bottles. 



Some of the large web-making spiders I came across in 

 my excursions through the plantations of Talisse are beau- 

 tifully coloured. They build large regular webs similar in 

 design to those of our own English Epeiras. I have often 

 noticed in their webs a number of very small spiders of 

 another kind altogether, and these I imagine act as scaven- 

 gers by devouring aU the small insects that the owners 

 refuse to notice. I was not aware at the time that Belt had 

 observed the same thing in the webs of the large spiders 

 of Nicaragua (4). 



My efforts to obtain scorpions were unsuccessful. I 

 hunted high and low for them in places which I thought 

 were favourable, and I endeavoured to enlist the services 

 of my boys and the natives of the island in the search by 

 showing them pictures of scorpions and offering rewards 

 for them ; but it was all in vain. Whether they actually 

 do occur in the northern peninsula of Celebes and th 

 islands I am unable to say, but at present I have no 

 evidence to show that they do. 



In hunting for scorpions I often came across large 

 centipedes belonging to the genus Scolopendra. They were 

 formidable uncanny-looking creatures, some of them six 

 or seven inches long and three-quarters of an inch across 

 the back. I was rather surprised that the natives seem 

 to have but little fear of them, although they must be 

 capable of giving a very painful and poisonous bite. In 

 dissecting one of these large Scolopendras soon after I had 

 killed it in chloroform, I was rather surprised to find the 



