Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/411

Rh great importance, I resolved to find out the truth through my own experiments, with the following results:

A few years ago I introduced into a capacious flask a she scorpion with her offspring of fifty little scorpions. They lost no time in regaining their position upon the mother's back, to which they regularly returned every time they were forcibly dislodged. In order to excite the voracity of the little ones, I withdrew all food from their reach, and even mutilated one of the mother's legs. The hæmorrhage thus produced failed to give the result hoped for. The fifty little scorpions changed their



skins and subsequently died of hunger. The mother came out unscathed. I repeated the experiment upon a later occasion, in Jamaica, placing together two different breeds upon one mother's back. The weak little scorpions died, as was to be expected, of starvation, and I vainly tried to provoke their voracity with the mother's blood.

But if science has exonerated scorpions from the horrible crime of matricide, it is by no means so clear that they are entirely deprived of the faculty of maiming themselves, and even of making attempts on their own life, an inclination which they possess in common with many other animals.

The assertion that scorpions, when surrounded by fire and deprived of all means of escape, commit suicide, was first advanced by Paracelsus. Some naturalists delaredeclare [sic] this to be a fact, while others deny it. Among the latter we may count Brehm, who,