Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/156

150 The 'Tommies' along the railway sometimes make one of these creatures fight with a scorpion. They place the combatants in some slippery vessel so that they can not run out. The scorpion is nearly always much the larger and heavier and has, in addition to its long arms and powerful nippers, a deadly sting. Yet it not infrequently happens that the Jacht Spinnekop comes off victorious, for it seizes the scorpion in its terrible shears and tears a huge hole in it with a quickness and force against which the scorpion is often powerless.

I have a fine large one before me as I write, nearly three inches long (from tip of jaws to end of abdomen), whose jaws alone are more than a quarter of its length, and are, across in front of the eyes, the broadest and solidest part of the whole creature. It is not poisonous; it needs no poison with such terrible jaws.

Passing from the most obvious feature of the Solifugæ, one remarks several other unique characteristics. In spiders, there are, in front of the first pair of legs, two feelers, one on each side of the head, called palps, shorter than the legs, except in very rare instances; in the scorpion, these palps become long arms with powerful nippers at the ends, and there are no delicate feelers; in the Solifugæ, these palps become long, stout and leg-like, with suckers at the ends for holding cr climbing, while there is the very interesting further development that the first pair of legs have ceased to be legs and have become thin, delicate feelers. But there is yet another development, if possible even more interesting still. Along the lower side of the last pair of legs are little white oval plates, supported at regular intervals on short stalks. These delicate little pedestals are sense organs of unknown function; it is possible they are organs of scent, enabling this great hunter to track his prey as he rushes along on the spoor.

Of the Solifugæ I have found some ten or twelve kinds, some belonging to genera hitherto very rare in South Africa. Dœsia is the rarest of the known genera here, and the local species is new. The first male found was only the second of the genus in the South African Museum collection. Dœsia is smallish and of a light, almost transparent, yellowish tint, and nocturnal in its habits. By day one finds them (if lucky enough to do so) under stones. Blossia, of which the species found is also new, is smaller than Dœsia and of a delicate pink color; of these I have found several females, but only one male. Another form is a tiny black one, belonging to an undescribed species and genus, and not more than a quarter of an inch long.

But I pass on to the genus Solpuga, in which the large kinds, diurnal and nocturnal, are found. When one first sees one of them on the veld, especially the commonest (S. chelicornis), one can hardly believe it is not a beautiful karoo flower. This Solpuga is about two