Occasional Notes. 
Do Scorpions commit Suicide ? — Quite a controversy 
has been maintained in recent years, by rival experi- 
mentalists, as to this question, which, after all, until the 
early part of this year, was left in a more or less unsatis- 
fa6lory condition. Quite recently Prof. BOURNE of 
Madras has thoroughly investigated the subje6l and has 
set forth the results in a paper communicated to the 
Royal Society of London, an abstract of which was 
published in Nature, April 21, 1887, from which the 
following is taken : — 
11 The most important of Mr. Bourne's propositions is that the poison 
of a scorpion is quite powerless to kill the same individual, or another indi- 
vidual of the same species, or even scorpions of other species. If this pro- 
position is established, there can of course be no further controversy about 
the matter. A priori^ it is not improbable, for Sir Joseph Fayrer has 
shewn that the cobra poison will not affect a cobra. Mr. Bourne fre- 
quently took a scorpion in his hand, and holding the sting between a 
pair of forceps pricked the scorpion with the sting and squeezed out its 
poison. There was a little bleeding from the wound, but in every case 
the scorpion lived for days. He also tried stinging one scorpion with 
another, using in the first instance specimens of the same species, then 
specimens of different species. Occasionally, he thinks, the stung 
individual became a trifle sluggish, but it never died from the sting. 
In order to make sure that his method of squeezing out the poison 
was perfectly effective, Mr. Bourne, after stinging a scorpion, some- 
times continued to hold the sting, and, taking a cockroach, squeezed 
out into it some more ot the poison. The cockroach invariably became 
very sluggish at once and died in an hour or so." 
Various experiments were made on insefts and crabs, 
and again on spiders and other allies of the scorpions, 
and in every case partial or complete paralysis, followed 
