yo NOTES OF A BOTANIST 
account of an impertinent intruder on his dormitory 
who was ignominiously tumbled down the ladder by 
his house-wasps. They serve to keep down the 
pest of large flies and cockroaches, and it is amus- 
ing to watch them at work, both as butchers and as 
builders. 
On the Casiquiari, when we were one day hook- 
ing along my piragoa against the rapid current, one 
of the hooks caught a branch on which was a large 
wasps' nest. The wasps sallied out in thousands, 
and the men threw down their hooks and leaped 
into the river. I was at work in the cabin, and had 
just time to throw myself flat on my face, when the 
fierce little animals came buzzing in, and settled on 
me in numbers, but not one of them stung me. 
The boat drifted down the stream, and in a few 
minutes all the wasps had left it, when the 
men clambered on board and pulled across to the 
opposite bank. Another day I had got on the top 
of the cabin to gather the flowers of a tree over- 
head, and the first thing I hooked down was a 
wasps' nest, which I kicked into the river, and then 
went on gathering my specimens — battling all the 
while with the wasps and getting severely stung — 
for I saw the tree was new (it is Hirtella Casi- 
quiarensis, n. sp. hb. 3196), and was determined 
not to leave it ungathered. 
Scorpions and centipedes are formidable and 
repulsive enough to look at — I have seen the latter 
1 1 inches long — but their sting or bite is rarely 
fatal. When it is so, the last stage of suflering is 
always lockjaw ; and it is the same in death from ant 
and wasp stings. I have been a few times stung 
by scorpions, but only once badly, in a finger which 
