Chilopoda. 
127 
food consists of various insects, spiders, mice, or any living thing Table-case 
that they are able to overpower. The largest known centipede No - 28, 
(. Scolopendra gig as), which is an inhabitant of the West Indies and 
South America, sometimes reaches £ 
genus Alices, which is confined to 
for the very peculiar structure of 
modified to form a stridulatory 
organ, whereby the animal emits 
a hissing sound. Ethmostigmus 
trigonopodus is the largest and 
commonest of the tropical African 
species of centipedes, and it is 
also met with less frequently in 
the more temperate parts of Africa. 
Several of the species belonging 
to this order are very widely dis- 
tributed, and two of them ( Scolo- 
pendra morsitans and S. subspi- 
nipes), have been introduced, like 
the common rat or cockroach, into 
most of the seaport towns of the 
world, but, unlike these animals, 
they are unable to maintain them- 
selves as far north as England. 
This order includes only a single 
British member ( Cryptops hor- 
tensis), which is not uncommon 
in gardens. 
Order— Craterostigmo- 
morpha. 
The dorsal plates number 
twenty- one in this order, but there 
are only fifteen pairs of legs, and 
the stigmata are reduced in num- 
ber as in the Lithobiomorpha. 
There is only a single species 
which occurs in Tasmania. 
. length of almost a foot. The 
tropical Africa, is remarkable 
the posterior legs, which are 
'rater ostigmns tasmanianus), 
Order Lithobiomorpha. 
Chilopoda in which the body is short and furnished with only 
fifteen pairs of legs, and six or seven pairs of stigmata arranged 
