Read Ebook: The Life of the Scorpion by Fabre Jean Henri Miall Bernard Translator Teixeira De Mattos Alexander Translator

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same stone. The Scorpion was at home; the other roaming about at night, had taken temporary shelter there. No regrettable incident had ensued from their cohabitation. Is this always so? We shall see.

I confront the two horrors with each other in a large glass jar containing sand. The Centipede goes round and round, hugging the wall of the arena. He is an undulating ribbon, a finger's breadth wide, four or five inches long and ringed with greenish rings on an amber-coloured ground. The long, vibrating antennae sound the space before him; their tips, sensitive as a finger, encounter the motionless Scorpion. The startled animal instantly turns tail. His circuit brings him back to the foe. There is a fresh contact, followed by a fresh flight.

But the Scorpion is now on his guard, with his arched tail advanced and his pincers open. When the Centipede returns to the dangerous point of his circular track, he is seized with the claws, in the neighbourhood of the head. In vain does the long, flexible animal twine and twist; imperturbably, the Scorpion grips it more firmly than ever with his pincers; and no jerks, windings or unwindings succeed in making him let go.

Meanwhile the sting is at work. Three and four times over it is driven into the sides of the Myriapod, who, for his part, opens wide his poison-fangs and strives to bite, without succeeding in doing so, for the front part of his body is held in the stubborn pincers. The hinder part alone struggles and wriggles, coils and uncoils. These efforts are useless. Kept at a distance by the long tongs, the Scolopendra's poisoned fangs are unable to act. I have seen many insect battles; I know none more horrible than that between these two monstrosities. It is enough to make your flesh creep.

A lull enables me to part the combatants and isolate them. The Centipede licks his bleeding wounds and recovers his strength in a few hours. As for the Scorpion, he has suffered no damage. Next day, a fresh assault is delivered. Three times in succession the Myriapod is stabbed, till the blood flows. Then, fearing reprisals, the Scorpion withdraws, as though frightened by his victory. The wounded animal does not strike back and continues its circular flight. This is enough for to-day. I surround the jar with a cardboard cylinder. When darkness is thus produced, they will both keep quiet.

What happens afterwards, especially at night, I do not know. Probably the battle begins all over again and further thrusts of the sting are delivered. At any rate the Centipede is much weaker on the third day. On the fourth, he is dying. The Scorpion watches him without yet daring to devour him. At last, when there is no more movement, the huge quarry is cut up; the head and then the first two segments are eaten. The dish is too copious; the remainder will go bad and be wasted. His exclusive taste for fresh meat will prevent the Scorpion from touching it.

Though stung seven times and oftener, the Centipede does not die until the fourth day; stung once only, the powerful Lycosa perishes that very instant. Death comes almost as quickly to the Praying Mantis, the Sacred Beetle, the Mole-cricket and other hardy specimens which, if impaled by the collector, would kick and struggle for weeks on the cork slab. Any insect stabbed by the sting finds itself forthwith in a parlous plight; the longest-lived are dead within twenty-four hours; and here we have the Centipedes, pinked seven times over, holding out for four days and perhaps dying from loss of blood as much as from the effects of the poison.

Why these points of difference? Apparently they are a matter of organisation. Life is an equilibrium whose stability varies according to the position in the hierarchy. At the top of the ladder, a fall is easy; at the bottom, there is a firm foothold. The finely-organised insect succumbs, whereas the coarser Millipede resists. Is this really the explanation? The Mole-cricket leaves us undecided. He, the boor, perishes just as quickly as do those refined creatures, the Butterfly and the Mantis. No, we do not yet know the secret which the Scorpion conceals in the phial at the end of his tail.

THE LANGUEDOCIAN SCORPION: THE IMMUNITY OF LARVAE

So little do we possess the Scorpion's secret that unexpected facts crop up that strangely complicate the problem. The study of life brings us these surprises. Repeated experiments, with mutually consistent results, seem to justify our formulation of a rule when, suddenly, important exceptions arise, compelling us to follow a fresh path, directly opposed to the first, and leading us to doubt which is the last stage on the road to knowledge. After labouring long and patiently, like an ox yoked to the plow, we have to plant a note of interrogation at the end of the field which we thought that we had made ready for sowing, without any hope of a final answer. One question leads to another.

To-day the Cetonia-larvae have forced upon me a similar change of opinion. It was at the end of November, late in the year, when the adult insect was becoming scarce. At this season of dearth, for lack of anything better wherewith to continue my experiments, I thought of resorting to the grubs of the Cetonia, grubs which abound all the year through in a heap of dead leaves in a corner of the enclosure. The naturalist who questions animals is necessarily a torturer: there is no other means of making them speak. A host of questions therefore sends my curiosity rummaging, as a regular thing, in that heap of leaf-mould. Every physiological laboratory has its appointed victims: the Frog, the Guinea-pig, even the Dog. The Cetonia-larva suffices for my rustic work-shop. I add the humble grub to the noble series of victims of whose suffering our knowledge is born.

The advanced and already cold season has not slackened the Scorpion's activity; the fat grub, on its part, in the warm moisture of the decayed leaves, has retained all the suppleness of its back. Both are in perfect condition. I bring them face to face.

The attack is not spontaneous. The larva flees obstinately, turned over on its back, skirting the wall of the cage. The Scorpion remains motionless and looks on; he draws to one side and makes way when the circular track brings the creature in his direction. It is not a prey to his liking, still less a dangerous adversary; and killing merely for killing's sake is not one of his vices. If I did not interfere, the peaceful encounter might continue indefinitely.

I worry the two of them, bring them into contact, irritate them with a bit of a straw, to such good purposes that my devices look like an attack on the part of the grub. The poor topsy-turvy creature is certainly not dreaming of fighting; it is a natural coward which, when in danger, curls up and refuses to move. Unaware of my tricks with the straw, the Scorpion ascribes to his innocent neighbour the annoyance of which I alone am the cause. He waves his sting on high and stabs. The blow has struck home, for the wound bleeds.

Relying on what the adult Cetonia showed me, I expect to see convulsions, the preludes of death. But what is this? When left to itself, the grub uncoils itself and makes off; it travels on its back neither faster nor slower than usual, as though it had not been wounded. Laid on the heap of leaf-mould, it swiftly dives down, without appearing in the least injured. I go to look at it a couple of hours later. It is as vigorous as before the experiment. Its state of health is the same the next day. What are we to make of this rebel? In its adult form, it would have dropped dead; in its larval form, it is indomitable. The wound was deep, since it bleeds, but perhaps the sting omitted to inject any poison, in which case it is a harmless prick, a negligible accident for the sturdy grub. We must try again.

The same subject is stung a second time, by another Scorpion. The result agrees with the first. The wounded grub ambles along on its back entirely at its ease; it dips down into the layer of rotten leaves and quietly resumes eating. The poisoned stab has not affected it.

This immunity cannot be an exceptional instance; there are no privileged individuals among the Cetoniae; any other subject of the same species ought to prove equally refractory. I unearth twelve larvae and have them stung, some of them twice or thrice in quick succession. All wriggle a little at the moment when the dirk enters; all lick the bleeding spot if they can reach it with their mouth and then quietly recover from their excitement. They amble along, with their legs in the air; they burrow down into the heart of the leaf-mould. I inspect them next day, the day after and the following days. The poison does not seem to have endangered them in any way.

They look so fit that I conceive a hope of rearing them. In this I succeed to perfection, without further trouble than that of renewing from time to time the provision of rotten leaves. The following year, in June, the twelve that have been subjected to the atrocious sting weave their cocoons and undergo metamorphosis. The Scorpion's stab has caused them no worse damage than a slight itching at the moment when the sting entered the belly.

This curious result reminds me of what Lenz tells us on the subject of the Hedgehog:

"I had a mother Hedgehog," he writes, "who was suckling her young. I threw a large Viper into her box. The Hedgehog soon felt that he was there, for she is guided by the sense of smell and not of sight. She got up, went fearlessly to the Snake and sniffed at him from head to foot, especially about the mouth. The Viper hissed and bit her several times on the snout and lips. As though to make fun of her feeble assailant, she contented herself with licking her wounds, continued her inspection and was once more bitten, but this time in the tongue. At last, she seized the Viper by the head, which she crunched between her jaws, together with the poison-fangs and glands. Then she devoured half the reptile, after which she returned to lie down beside her young and give them to suck. That evening she ate another Viper and what remained of the first. Her health was not affected thereby, nor was that of the little Hedgehogs; her wounds did not even swell.

"Two days later, there was a new Viper and a new fight. The Hedgehog went up to the reptile and smelt it. Opening her jaws and erecting her poison-fangs, the Viper rushed upon her, bit her in the upper lip and remained hanging there for a time. The Hedgehog shook him off and, though bitten ten times in the muzzle and twenty times elsewhere, amidst the prickles, she seized him by the head and devoured him slowly, notwithstanding his contortions. This time again neither the mother nor the sucklings seemed unwell."

She did, the Cetonia-larva tells us for our answer. If any members of the insect clan has to provide itself with defensive means against the Scorpion's attacks, it is certainly not the grub that dwells amid vegetable decay. The two do not frequent the same places, which makes meetings almost impossible. On the larva's part, therefore, there is no increasing tolerance of the poison. The first to find themselves in the Scorpion's presence are perhaps those which I myself place there. Nevertheless, without preparations of any kind, behold the grub refractory to the sting. It possesses, from the first, powers of resistance to the poison which is quite as surprising as that of the reptile-eater.

That the Hedgehog, the appointed exterminator of Vipers, should be endowed with the prerogatives essential to her calling is strictly logical. In the same way, the Bee-eater, the handsomest bird of Mediterranean provinces, crams his crop with impunity with live Wasps; in the same way, the Cuckoo suffers from no irritation when he fills his stomach with a barbed wire entanglement of stinging hairs from the Processionary Caterpillar. The function exercised will have it so.

But why need the larva of the Cetonia safeguard itself against the Scorpion, whom she probably never meets? We dare not believe in privileges; rather do we suspect a general aptitude. The Cetonia-larva resists the Scorpion's sting, not as a Cetonia, but as a grub, a preparatory phase on the way to a higher organization. If so, all the larvae, in a greater or lesser degree, according to their robustness, must possess similar powers of resistance.

What does experiment say on the subject? It behooves us to exempt from the test the weaker grubs, of a delicate constitution. To them a mere prick, without the aid of the poison, would mean a serious and often fatal wound. The point of a needle would gravely injure them. What would it be with the brutal stiletto, even though not poisoned? What we need is a few corpulent grubs which would think little of a perforated belly.

And here I have the very thing I want. An old olive-stump softened underground by decay, provides me with the larva of the Rhinoceros Beetle. It is a plump sausage, as thick as a man's thumb. When stung by the Scorpion, the paunchy grub glides among the scraps of decayed olive-wood with which I have furnished a glass jar; heedless of its mishap, it works its jaws so lustily that, eight months later, having thrived and waxed fat, it is preparing its cell for the metamorphosis. It has passed through the dreadful ordeal unscathed.

As for the adult insect, we have already seen what it does. Stung on the upper surface of the abdomen, under the lifted wing-cases, the colossus soon topples over and feebly kicks its legs about in the air. All movement ceases in three or four days at most. The powerful creature dies; its grub loses nothing in either strength or appetite.

This instance of correct prevision on my part is confirmed by a number of others. In front of my door are two old cherry-laurels, magnificently green at all times of the year. A Capricorn is ruining them for me. This is the little Cerambyx cerdo, the usual inhabitant of the hawthorn. The aroma of prussic acid, instead of repelling him, attracts him; the horned dandy is well acquainted with it, thanks to his long experience of the clusters of the hawthorn-blossoms with their searching smell. This alien tree suits him so well for establishing his family that the axe will have to intervene if I want to save what remains.

I cut down the boughs that have suffered most damage. From one limb split into fragments I obtain a dozen of the Capricorn's larvae. My inspection of the neighbouring hedge-rows provides me with the perfect insect. And now we'll have it out together, O destroyer of my leafy arbour! You shall make amends to me for your misdeeds; you shall die by the Scorpion.

The adults indeed succumb; but the larvae resist. Lodged in a glass jar, with tiny morsels of the demolished tree, they quietly resume their gnawing. If the provisions do not dry up, the grubs wounded by the Scorpion complete their larval life without accident.

The Capricorn of the Oak, Cerambyx heros, behaves in a like fashion. The great horn-wearer perishes; his grub does not mind the sting a jot, for, when restored to its place in the gallery, it tunnels the wood as it did before and completes its development.

The result is the same with the Common Cockchafer. The stabbed insect dies in a few minutes; the White Worm, on the contrary, holds out, goes underground and climbs back to the surface to gnaw the lettuce-stalk which I have given it. If my patience as an insect-rearer did not tire, the victim of the accident, from which it quickly recovers, would become a Cockchafer, as may be seen from the paunch sleek and glossy with health.

A near kinsman of the Stag-beetle, Dorcus parallelopipedus, whose larva I find in an old tamarisk-stump, adds his evidence to that of the above: the adult insect dies, the larva resists. These instances are sufficient; there is no need to continue on these lines.

Cetonia-, Oryctes-, Capricorn-, Cockchafer- and Dorcus-grubs are fat creatures, addicted to a vegetarian diet. Do these plump larvae owe their immunity to the nature of their victuals? Or, on the other hand, can the fatty stratum, in which the reserves of these insatiable eaters accumulate, neutralize the virulence of the sting? Let us enquire of some lean flesh-eaters.

I choose the largest of our Ground-Beetles, Procrusies coriaceus, a saturnine hunter whom I meet at the foot of the walls, disembowelling a Snail. A bold highwayman and built for fighting, he welds his wing-cases into an inviolable cuirass. I pare away a little of his armour behind, in order to render accessible to the Scorpion's sting the only penetrable part, the upper surface of the abdomen.

We see a repetition of the Gold Beetle's wretched end. The fight against the agonies of the sting would strike us with horror, if things were happening in a higher world. Thus struggles a Dog tortured by the municipal sausage seasoned with strychnine. At first the wounded Beetle scurries off desperately. Suddenly, he stops and raises himself high on his stiffened legs; he lifts his hinder part, lowers his head and supports himself on his mandibles as though about to turn a somersault. A jolt topples him over. He falls; quickly he stands up again and resumes his unnatural attitude. To look at him you would say that his joints were controlled by wires. He is like an automaton worked by a jerky spring. Another shake, another fall, another recovery: and this goes on for twenty minutes or so. At last the demented Beetle collapses on his back and does not get up again, though his limbs continue to move. Next morning he is absolutely motionless.

And what of the larva? Well, though destitute of the layer of fat which would seem to protect the grubs of the Cetonia, the Oryctes and the others, the meagre grub of the Procrustes is so little harmed by the Scorpion's sting that, a fortnight after the ordeal, it buries itself in the ground and digs itself a cell in which the transformation is effected. Lastly, not long after, the adult emerges from the soil in perfect health. Therefore neither the diet nor the degree of stoutness is responsible for this immunity.

Nor is the place occupied in the entomological series, as the Moths will tell us, now that the Beetles have spoken. The first to be questioned is the Zeuzera, whose caterpillar has a calamitous effect upon various trees and shrubs. I take a mother at the moment when she is slipping her long ovipositor into the crevices in the bark of a lilac-tree, to lay her eggs. She is magnificent in her white costume adorned with steel-blue spots. I place her at the Scorpion's mercy. The business is not protracted. No sooner is the Zeuzera stung than she dies, with no disordered motions. Death is gentle to her.

And the caterpillar? After the prick, the caterpillar is as well as before. Restored to the gallery whence I extracted it by splitting its lilac-branch, it works away busily as usual: I can see this by the sawdust ejected through the orifice of the cell. The chrysalis and the Moth come in the summer, according to rule.

The Silkworm, which I am able to procure in such numbers as I require from the nurseries at the farms hard by, lends itself much better to experiment. At the end of May, when the rearing is nearly finished, I cause a couple of dozen to be stung. The worms have a fine, chubby skin, into which the sting each time enters easily, producing a copious hemorrhage. The little table on which my curiosity drives me to perpetrate these barbarities is soon covered with splashes of blood like drops of liquid amber.

When restored to their litter of mulberry-leaves, the wounded almost at once set to browsing with their usual appetite. Ten days later, all, from the first to the last, weave their cocoons, which are perfectly normal in shape and thickness. Lastly, from these cocoons, without any losses, emerge Moths whom we shall presently question in another connection. For the moment it is proved that the Silkworm resists the Scorpion's sting. As for the Moth herself, we know what becomes of her. She succumbs slowly, it it true, after the manner of the Great Peacock; but at all events she succumbs: the sting is always fatal.

The Spurge Hawk-moth gives the same answer: the Moth dies quickly: the caterpillar defies the sting, eats its fill and then goes underground itself into a chrysalis under a coarse veil of sand and silk. Nevertheless, among the number operated upon, there are some which are stabbed to death, perhaps because of the multiplicity of their wounds. The skin offers a certain resistance to perforation and the discharge of blood remains uncertain, leaving me undecided as to the efficiency of the stab. I was obliged to prolong the struggle until the evidence was complete and it is probable that I sometimes went too far. The caterpillar which, if pricked but once, would have withstood the ordeal as sturdily as the Silkworm perishes from an overdose.

The mighty, turquoise-bedecked caterpillar of the Great Peacock supplies me with very definite results. When pricked till the blood comes and then replaced on its grazing-ground, the branch of almond, it completes its development and accurately spins its ingenious cocoon.

The Dipteron and the Hymenopteron should be worth examination. Like the Moth and the Beetle, they undergo a general remoulding through the action of the metamorphosis; but they are small-sized and for the most part could not be easily manipulated were my tweezers to present them to the sting. Their delicate larvae would die merely of the perforation of the skin. Let us question only the giants.

These latter include various Orthoptera, the Tryxalis, the Grey Locust, the White-faced Decticus, the Mole-cricket, the Mantis. As we have already seen, all these succumb when struck by the Scorpion's sting. Now, in their group, the complete development essential to the festival of the pairing is preceded by a transition-form which, without being actually larval, and presenting no likeness whatever to the adult, constitutes an inferior stage, a step towards the marriageable.

The Grey Locust, as we see him on the vine at vintage-time, does not yet possess his magnificent network wings, nor his leathery wing-cases; he possesses only their rudiments, reduced to skimpy coat-tails. The Mole-cricket, who ends by displaying an ample set of wings, which fold back into a sharp tail and enclose the tip of the abdomen, has at first only ungainly stumps, fastened to the upper part of the back.

We behold the same sign of juvenile inferiority in the young Tryxalis, the young Decticus and the others. These mighty, aerial sailing-craft of the future have their canvas enclosed in the germ, in mean-looking sheaths. As for the rest, the insect is, from the beginning, very nearly what it will be in all the fullness of its finery. Age develops and does not transform the Orthopteron.

Now are these incomplete insects, with wing-stumps in the place of wings, are these young insects capable of withstanding the Scorpion's sting as do the true larvae, the babes of the Oryctes and the Capricorn, the caterpillar of the Hawk-moth and the Bombyx? If the generous sap of youth is an adequate preservative, we ought to find immunity here. We find nothing of the sort. With wings or without, old or young, the Mole-cricket perishes. The Mantis, the Locust, the Tryxalis, whether adult or incomplete, perish likewise.

In the matter of resistance to the Scorpion's poison we are therefore led to class insects in two categories: on the one hand, those which undergo a real transformation, accompanied by an alteration of the whole organism; on the other hand, those which undergo only secondary modifications. In the first division, the larva resists and the adult dies; in the second, death invariably ensues.

What reason can we discover for this difference? Experiment shows us first that resistance to the sting increases as the nature of the victim becomes less highly organized. The Lycosa, the Epeira, the Mantis, all exceedingly sensitive to impressions, succumb on the instant, as though struck by lightning; the Gold Beetle and the Procrustes, those strenuous livers, are seized forthwith with convulsions similar to those produced by strychnine; the Sacred Beetle, a spirited pill-roller, prances in a sort of St. Vitus' dance. On the other hand, the sluggish Oryctes, the lazy Cetonia, both lovers of protracted slumbers in the heart of the roses, bear their misfortunes patiently and fidget feebly for whole days on end before giving up the ghost. Beneath them is the Acridian, the Locust, the essential rustic. Lower still comes the Centipede, an inferior being, roughly organized. It is evident therefore that the venom acts more quickly or more slowly according to the patient's nervous constitution.

Let us consider separately the insects of a superior order, subject to complete transformations. The word metamorphosis applied to them means a change of form. Now is it only the shape that changes when the caterpillar turns into a Moth, or when the grub in the leaf-mould becomes a Cetonia? More than this occurs and much more, as the Scorpion's sting informs us.

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