THE LANGUEDOCIAN SCORPION: THE FAMILY

The Life of the Scorpion by Jean-Henri Fabre, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. THE LANGUEDOCIAN SCORPION: THE FAMILY

CHAPTER VII. THE LANGUEDOCIAN SCORPION: THE FAMILY

Book-knowledge is a poor resource in the problems of life; assiduous study with the facts is preferable in this connection to the best stocked library. In many cases, ignorance is a good thing: the mind retains its freedom of investigation and does not stray along the roads leading nowhither, suggested by one’s reading. I have proved the truth of this once more.

An anatomical monograph had told me that the Languedocian Scorpion is big with young in September. Although it was written by a master’s hand, how much better should I have done not to consult it! The family sees the light of day long before this season, at least in my climate; and, as the rearing lasts but a short time, I should have seen nothing had I delayed until September. A third year of observation, tiresome to wait for, would have become necessary, in [154]order at last to witness a sight which I foresaw to be of the highest interest. But for exceptional circumstances, I should have allowed the fleeting opportunity to pass, and should have lost a year and perhaps even abandoned the subject.

Yes, ignorance may have its advantages; the new is found far from the beaten track. One of our most illustrious masters, little suspecting the lesson he was giving me, taught me that some time ago. One fine day, Pasteur1 rang unexpectedly at my front-door: the very same man who was soon to acquire such world-wide celebrity. His name was familiar to me. I had read the scholar’s fine work on the dissymmetry of tartaric acid; I had followed with the greatest interest his researches on the theory of spontaneous generation.

Each period has its scientific crotchet: to-day, it is evolution; in those days, it was spontaneous generation. With his glass bulbs made sterile or fertile at will, with his experiments which were magnificent in their severity and simplicity, Pasteur gave the [155]death-blow to the lunacy which professed to see life springing from a chemical conflict in the seat of putrefaction.

At this time, the dispute, which was to be so triumphantly elucidated, was at its height. I welcomed my distinguished visitor to the best of my ability. The scientist had come to me before all others for certain particulars. I owed this signal honour to my quality of fellow physicist and chemist. Such a poor, obscure, fellow scientist!

Pasteur’s tour through the Avignon region had sericiculture for its object. For some years, the Silk-worm-nurseries had been in confusion, ravaged by unknown plagues. The worms, for no appreciable reason, were falling into a putrid deliquescence, and then hardening, so to speak, into plaster sugar-plums. The downcast peasant saw one of his chief crops disappearing; after great trouble and expense, he had to fling his nurseries on the dust-heap.

A few words were exchanged on the prevailing blight; and then, without further preamble, my visitor said:

“I should like to see some cocoons. I [156]have never seen any; I know them only by name. Could you get me some?”

“Nothing easier. My landlord happens to sell cocoons; and he lives in the next house. If you will wait a moment, I will bring you what you want.”

Four steps took me to my neighbour’s, where I crammed my pockets with cocoons. I came back and handed them to the savant. He took one; he turned and turned it between his fingers; he examined it curiously, as one would a strange object from the other end of the world. He put it to his ear and shook it.

“Why, it makes a noise!” he said, quite surprised. “There’s something inside!”

“Of course there is.”

“What is it?”

“The chrysalis.”

“How do you mean, the chrysalis?”

“I mean the sort of mummy into which the caterpillar changes before becoming a Moth.”

“And has every cocoon one of those things inside it?”

“Obviously. It is to protect the chrysalis that the caterpillar spins.”[157]

“Really!”

And without more words, the cocoons passed into the pocket of the savant, who was to instruct himself at his leisure touching that great novelty, the chrysalis. I was struck by this magnificent assurance. Pasteur had come to regenerate the Silkworm, while knowing nothing about caterpillars, cocoons, chrysalids or metamorphoses. The ancient gymnasts came naked to the fight. The talented combatant of the plague of our Silk-worm-nurseries hastened to the battle likewise naked, that is to say, destitute of the simplest notions about the insect which he was to deliver from danger. I was staggered; nay, more, I was thunderstruck.

I was not so much amazed by what followed. Pasteur was occupied at the time with another question, that of the improvement of wine by heating. Suddenly changing the conversation,

“Show me your cellar,” he said.

I! I show my cellar, my private cellar, poor I, lately, with my pitiful teacher’s salary, could not allow myself the luxury of a little wine and used to make a sort of [158]small cider by setting a handful of brown sugar and some grated apples to ferment in a jar! My cellar! Show my cellar! Why not my barrels, my cobwebbed bottles, each labelled with its year and quality! My cellar!

Full of confusion, I evaded the request and tried to change the subject. But he persisted:

“Show me your cellar, please.”

There was no resisting such firmness. I pointed with my finger to a corner in the kitchen, where stood a chair with no seat to it and, on that chair, a demijohn containing two or three gallons.

“That’s my cellar, sir.”

“Is that your cellar?”

“I have no other.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes, that’s all, I’m sorry to say.”

“Really!”

Not a word more; nothing further from the savant. Pasteur, it was evident, had never tasted the highly-spiced dish which the vulgar call la vache enragée. Though my cellar—the dilapidated chair and the more than half-empty demijohn—had nothing to [159]tell of the fermentation to be checked by heat, it spoke eloquently of another thing which my illustrious visitor seemed not to understand. There was one microbe that escaped his notice, and a very terrible microbe: that of ill-fortune strangling good-will.

In spite of the unlucky introduction of the cellar, I am none the less struck by his serene assurance. He knows nothing of the transformation of insects; he has just seen a cocoon for the first time and learnt that there is something inside that cocoon, the rough draft of the moth that will be; he is ignorant of what is known to the meanest schoolboy of our southern province; and this novice, whose artless questions surprise me so greatly, is about to revolutionize the hygiene of the Silk-worm nurseries. In the same way, he will revolutionize medicine and general hygiene.

His weapon is theory, heedless of details, and taking a bird’s-eye view of the whole question. What cares he for metamorphoses, larvæ, nymphs, cocoons, pupæ, chrysalids and the thousand and one little secrets of entomology! For the purposes of his problem, perhaps, it is just as well to be ignorant [160]of all that. His theories will retain their independence and their daring flight all the more easily; their movements will be all the freer, when released from the leading-strings of the known.

Encouraged by the magnificent example of the cocoons rattling in Pasteur’s astonished ears, I have made it a rule to adopt the method of ignorance in my investigations of the instincts. I read very little. Instead of turning the pages of books, an expensive proceeding quite beyond my means, instead of consulting other people, I persist in obstinately interviewing my subject until I succeed in making him speak. I know nothing. So much the better: my queries will be all the freer, now in this direction, now in the opposite, according to the glimpses of light obtained. And if, by chance, I do open a book, I take care to leave a compartment of my mind wide open to doubt; for the soil which I am clearing bristles with weeds and brambles.

For lack of taking this precaution, I very nearly wasted a year. Relying on what I had read, I did not look for the family of the Languedocian Scorpion until September; [161]and I obtained it quite unexpectedly in July. The difference between the real and the anticipated date I ascribe to the disparity of the climates: my observations were all made in Provence and my informant, Léon Dufour,2 made his in Spain. Notwithstanding the master’s high authority, I ought to have been on my guard. I was not; and I should have lost the opportunity if, as luck would have it, the Common Black Scorpion had not taught me. Ah, how right was Pasteur not to know the chrysalis!

The Common Scorpion, smaller and much less active than the other, was reared, for purposes of comparison, in some humble glass jam-pots standing on the table in my study. These unassuming receptacles did not take up much room and were easy to examine and I made a point of visiting them daily. Every morning, before sitting down to blacken a few pages of my diary with prose, I invariably lifted the piece of cardboard which I employed to shelter my boarders [162]and enquired into the happenings of the night. These daily inspections were not so feasible in the large glass cage, whose numerous dwellings would all be thrown into confusion, if they were to be examined one by one and then methodically set in order as discovered. With my pots of Black Scorpions, the inspection was the matter of a moment.

It was well for me that I always had this auxiliary establishment before my eyes. On the 22nd of July, at six o’clock in the morning, raising the cardboard screen, I found a mother beneath it, with her little ones clustering on her back like a sort of white cloak. I experienced one of those moments of sweet contentment which, at intervals, reward the long-suffering observer. For the first time I had before my eyes the fine spectacle of the Scorpioness clad in her young. The delivery was quite recent: it must have taken place during the night, for, on the previous evening, the mother was naked.

Further successes awaited me: on the next day, a second mother is whitened with her brood: the day after that, two others at a time are in the same condition. That makes [163]four. It is more than my ambition hoped for. With four families of Scorpions and a few quiet days before me, we may find some pleasure in life.

All the more so as fortune loads me with her favours. Ever since the first discovery in the jars, I have been thinking of the glass jars and asking myself whether the Languedocian Scorpion might not be as forward as her black sister. Let us make haste and see.

I turn over the twenty-five tiles. A glorious success! I feel one of those hot waves of enthusiasm with which I was familiar at the age of twenty rush through my old veins. Under three out of the total number of tiles, I find a mother laden with her family. One has young that are already quite of a fair size, about a week old, as my subsequent observations informed me; the two others have borne their children recently, during the recent night, as is proved by certain remnants jealously guarded under the paunch. We shall see presently what these remnants represent.

July runs to an end, August and September pass and nothing more occurs to swell my collection. The period of the family, therefore, [164]for both Scorpions is the second fortnight in July. From that time onwards everything is finished. And yet, among my guests in the black cage, there are still some females as big and fat as those from whom I have obtained progeny. I reckoned on these too for an increase in the population; all the appearances authorized me to do so. Winter comes and none of them has answered my expectations. The business, which seemed close at hand, has been put off to next year: a fresh proof of long gestation, very singular in the case of an animal of a lower order.

I transfer each mother and her product, separately, into medium-sized receptacles, which facilitate conscientious observation. At the early hour of my visit, those brought to bed during the night have still a part of the brood sheltered under their bellies. Pushing the mother aside with a straw, I discover, amid the heap of young not yet hoisted on the maternal back, objects that utterly upset all that the books have taught me on this subject. The Scorpions, they say are viviparous. The scientific expression lacks exactitude: the young do not first see [165]the light in the shape with which we are familiar.

And this must be so. How would you have the outstretched claws, the sprawling legs, the curled-up tails make their way through the maternal passages? The cumberous little animal could never pass through the narrow outlets. It must needs enter the world packed up and sparing of space.

The remnants found under the mothers, in fact, show me eggs, real eggs, similar, or very nearly, to those which dissection extracts from the ovaries at an advanced stage of pregnancy. The little animal, economically compressed to the dimensions of a grain of rice, has its tail laid along its belly, its claws flattened against its chest, its legs pressed to its sides, so that the small easily gliding oval mass presents not the slightest protuberance. On the forehead, dots of an intense black mark the eyes. The tiny insect floats in a drop of transparent moisture, which is for the moment its world, its atmosphere, contained by a pellicle of exquisite delicacy.

These objects are really eggs. There were thirty or forty of them, at first, in the Languedocian Scorpion’s litter; not quite [166]so many in the Black Scorpion’s. Intervening too late in the nocturnal confinement, I am present at the finish. The little that remains, however, is sufficient to convince me. The Scorpion is in reality oviparous; only, her eggs hatch very speedily and the liberation of the young follows very soon after the laying.

Now how does this liberation take place? I enjoy the remarkable privilege of witnessing it. I see the mother with the points of her mandibles delicately seizing, tearing, peeling off and lastly swallowing the membrane of the egg. She strips her new-born offspring with the fastidious care and fondness of the Sheep and the Cat eating the fœtal wrappers. Not a scratch on that scarce-formed flesh, not a limb strained, in spite of the clumsiness of the tool employed.

I cannot get over my surprise: the Scorpion has initiated the race into processes of maternity bordering on our own. In the distant days of the carboniferous periods, when the first Scorpion appeared, the tender cases of child-birth were already preparing. The egg, the equivalent of the long-sleeping seed, the egg, as already possessed by the reptile [167]and the fish and later to be possessed by the bird and almost the whole body of insects, was the contemporary of an infinitely more delicate organism which ushered in the viviparousness of the higher animals. The incubation of the germ did not take place outside, amidst the threatening conflict of things; it was accomplished in the mother’s womb.

The progressive movements of life know no gradual stages, from fair to good, from good to excellent; they proceed by leaps and bounds, in some cases advancing, in some recoiling. The ocean has its rythmical ebb and flow. Life, that other ocean, more unfathomable than the watery ocean, has its ebb and flow likewise. Will it have any other tides? Who can say it will? Who can say that it will not?

If the Sheep did not assist by swallowing the membranous envelopes after picking them up with her lips, never would the Lamb succeed in extricating itself from its swaddling-clothes. In the same way, the little Scorpion calls for its mother’s aid. I see some that, caught in stickiness, writhe aimlessly in the half-torn ovarian sac, unable to free [168]themselves. It wants a touch of the mother’s teeth to complete the deliverance. It is doubtful even whether the young insect contributes to effect the laceration. Its weakness is of no avail against that other weakness, the natal envelope, though this be as slender as the inner lining of an onion-skin.

The young Chick has a temporary callosity at the end of its beak, which serves it as a pick-axe to break the shell. The young Scorpion, condensed, to economise space, to the dimensions of a grain of rice, waits inertly for help from without. The mother has to do everything. She works with such a will that the accessories of childbirth disappear altogether, even the few sterile eggs being swept away with the others in the general flow. Not a remnant of the now useless tatters; everything has returned to the mother’s stomach; and the spot of ground that received the litter is swept absolutely clear.

So here we have the young scrupulously cleaned and free. They are white. Their length from head to tail, measures nine millimetres3 in the Languedocian Scorpion and [169]four4 in the Black. As the liberating toilet is completed, they climb, first one and then the other, on the mother’s back, hoisting themselves, without excessive haste, along the claws, which the Scorpion holds flat on the ground, in order to facilitate the ascent. Close packed one against the other, entangled at random, they form a continuous sheet upon her back. With the aid of their little claws, they settle themselves pretty firmly. I find some difficulty in sweeping them away with the point of a camel-hair pencil without more or less hurting the feeble creatures. At this stage neither steed nor burden budges: it is the fit moment for experiment. Clad in her offspring assembled to form a mantle of white muslin, the Scorpion is a spectacle worthy of attention. She remains motionless, with her tail curled on high. If I threaten the family too closely with a straw, she at once lifts her two claws in an angry attitude, rarely adopted in her own defence. The two fists are raised as if for sparring, the nippers wide open, ready to thrust and parry. The tail is seldom brandished: [170]to loosen it suddenly would give a shock to the spine and perhaps make a part of the load fall to the ground. The bold, sudden, imposing menace of the fists suffices.

My curiosity takes no notice of it. I push off one of the little ones and place it facing its mother, a finger’s breadth distant. The mother does not seem to trouble about the accident: motionless she was, motionless she remains. Why perturb herself about a tumble? The fallen child will be quite able to manage for itself. It gesticulates, it moves about: and then, finding one of the mother’s claws within its reach, it clambers up nimbly enough and joins the crowd of its brothers. It resumes its seat in the saddle, but is far from displaying the agility of the Lycosa’s sons, who are expert riders, versed in the art of vaulting on horseback.

The experiment is repeated on a larger scale. This time, I sweep a part of the load to the ground; the little ones are scattered to no very great distance. There is a somewhat lengthy, hesitating pause. While the brats wander about, without quite knowing where to go, the mother at last becomes [171]at the state of affairs. With her two arms—I am speaking of the pedipalpi that carry the pincers—with her two arms joined in a semicircle, she rakes and gathers the sand so as to bring the truants towards her. This is done awkwardly, clumsily, with no precautions against accidental crushing. The Hen, with a soft, clucking call, makes the wandering Chicks return to the pale; the Scorpion collects her family with the sweep of the rake. All are safe and sound nevertheless. As soon as they come in contact with the mother, they climb up and form themselves again into the dorsal group.

Strangers are admitted to this group as well as the legitimate offspring. If, with the camel-hair broom, I dislodge a matron’s family, wholly or in part, and place it within reach of a second mother, laden with her own family, the latter will collect the young ones by armfuls, as she would her own offspring, and meekly allow the newcomers to mount upon her back. One would say that she adopts them, were the expression not too ambitious. There is no adoption. We have once more the blindness of the Lycosa, [172]who is incapable of distinguishing between her own and another’s progeny, and welcomes all that swarms about her legs.

I expected to come upon excursions similar to those of the Lycosa, whom it is not unusual to meet scouring the heath with her pack of children on her back. The Scorpion knows nothing of these diversions. Once she becomes a mother, for sometime she does not leave her home, not even in the evening, at the hour when others sally forth to frolic. Barricaded in her cell, not troubling to eat, she watches over the upbringing of her young.

As a matter of fact, these frail creatures have a ticklish ordeal to undergo: they have, one might say, to be born a second time. They prepare for it by immobility and by an inward labour not unlike that which turns the larva into the perfect insect. In spite of their fairly correct appearance as Scorpions, the young ones have rather indistinct features, which look as though seen through a mist. One is inclined to credit them with a sort of child’s smock, which they must throw off in order to grow slender and acquire a definite outline.[173]

A week spent without moving, on the mother’s back, is required for this work. Then there takes place an excoriation which I hesitate to describe by the expression moult, so greatly does it differ from the true moult, undergone later at repeated intervals. For the latter, the skin splits over the thorax; and the animal emerges through this single fissure, leaving a dry, cast-off garment behind it, similar in shape to the Scorpion that has just discarded it. The empty mould retains the exact outline of the moulded animal.

But, this time, we have something different. I place a few young ones in the act of shedding their skin on a sheet of glass. They are motionless, sorely tried, it seems, almost spent. The skin bursts, without special lines of cleavage; it tears at one and the same time in front, behind, at the sides; the legs come out of their gaiters, the claws leave their gauntlets, the tail quits its scabbard. The cast skin falls in rags on all sides at once. It is a peeling without order and in tatters. When it is done, the stripped insects present the normal appearance of Scorpions. They have also acquired agility. [174]Although still pale in tint, they are nimble, quick to set foot to earth in order to run and play beside their mother. The most striking part of this progress is the rapid growth. The young of the Languedocian Scorpion measured nine millimetres in length; they now measure fourteen.5 Those of the Black Scorpion have grown from four to six or seven millimetres.6 The length increases by one half, which nearly trebles the volume.

Surprised by this sudden growth, we wonder what the cause can be, for the little ones have taken no food. Their weight has not increased; on the contrary, it has diminished; for we must remember that the skin has been cast. The volume increases, but not the mass. There is, therefore, a distension up to a certain point, which may be compared with that of inorganic bodies under the influence of heat. A secret change takes place, which groups the living molecules into a more spacious combination; and the volume increases without the addition of fresh materials. One who, possessed of a fine patience and suitably equipped, cared to follow the [175]rapid changes of this architecture would, I think, reap a harvest of some value. I, in my penury, abandon the problem to others.

The remnants of the peeling process are white strips, satiny rags, which, so far from falling to the ground, adhere to the back of the mother Scorpion, especially near the base of the legs, where they become tangled into a soft carpet on which the lately-stripped insects rest. The mount now boasts a saddle-cloth well adapted to hold her restless riders in their seats. Whether these have to alight or to remount, the layer of tatters, now become a solid harness, affords support for rapid movement.

When I topple over the family with a slight stroke of the camel-hair pencil, it is amusing to see how quickly the unhorsed ones resume their seat in the saddle. The fringes of the housings are grasped, the tail is used as a lever and, with a bound, the rider is in his place. This curious carpet, a real boarding-net which makes climbing easy, lasts, without dislocations, for nearly a week, that is to say, until the emancipation. Then it falls off of its own accord, either as a whole or piecemeal, and nothing remains [176]of it when the young are dispersed over the surrounding country.

Meantime, signs of the colouring appear; the tail and belly are tinged with saffron, the claws assume the soft brilliancy of translucent amber. Youth beautifies all things. The little Languedocian Scorpions are really magnificent. If they remained thus, if they did not carry a poison-still, soon to become threatening, they would be pretty creatures which we should find a pleasure in rearing. Soon the wish for emancipation awakens in them. They gladly descend from the mother’s back to frolic merrily round about her. If they stray too far, the mother cautions them and brings them back again by sweeping the rake of her arms over the sand.

At the time of the siesta, the sight furnished by the Scorpioness is almost as good as that of the Hen and her Chicks at rest. Most of the little ones are on the ground, pressed close against their mother: a few are stationed on the white saddle-cloth, a delightful cushion. There are some who clamber up the the mother’s tail, perch on the crest of the curve and seem to delight in [177]looking down from this point of vantage upon the crowd. More acrobats arrive, who dislodge them and take their places. All want their share in the curiosities provided by the conning-tower.

The bulk of the family is around the mother; there is a constant swarm of brats that crawl under the belly and there squat, leaving their forehead, with the gleaming black eye-points, outside. The more restless prefer the mother’s legs, which to them represent a gymnasium; they here swing as on a trapeze. Next, at their leisure, the whole troop climb up to her back again, resume their places and settle down; and nothing more stirs, neither mother nor little ones.

This period, during which the Scorpion is matured and prepared for emancipation, lasts a week, exactly as long as the strange process that trebles the volume without food. The family remains upon the mother’s back for a fortnight, all told. The Lycosa carries her young for six or seven months, during which time they are always active and lively, although unfed. What do those of the Scorpion eat, at least after the excoriation [178]that has given them agility and a new life? Does the mother invite them to her meals and reserve the tenderest morsels of her repasts for them? She invites nobody; she reserves nothing.

I serve her a Locust, chosen among the small game that seems to me best-suited to the delicate nature of her offspring. While she gnaws the morsel, without troubling in the least about her surroundings, one of the little ones slips down her back, advances over her head and leans down to enquire what is happening. He touches her jaws with the tip of his leg; then briskly he decamps, startled. He makes off; and he is well-advised. The abyss engaged in the work of mastication, so far from reserving him a mouthful, might perhaps snap him up and swallow him without giving him a further thought.

A second is hanging on behind the Locust, the fore part of whose body the mother is munching. He nibbles, he pulls, eager for a bit. His perseverance comes to nothing: the fare is too tough.

It is plain enough to see: the appetite is awakening; the young would gladly accept [179]food, if the mother took the least care to offer them any, especially food adapted to the frailty of their tender stomachs: but she just eats for herself and that is all.

What do you want, O my pretty little Scorpions, who have provided me with such delightful moments? You want to go away, to some distant place, in search of victuals, of the tiniest of tiny beasties. I can see it by your restless roving. You run away from your mother, who, on her side, ceases to know you. You are strong enough: the hour has come to disperse.

If I knew exactly what infinitesimal game is to your liking and if I had sufficient time to procure it for you, I should love to continue your upbringing, but not among the potsherds of your native cage, in the company of your elders. I know their intolerant spirit. The ogres would eat you up, my children. Your own mothers would not spare you. You are strangers to them henceforth. Next year, at the wedding-season, they would eat you, the jealous creatures! You had better go; prudence demands it.

Where could I lodge you and how could [180]I feed you? The best thing is to say good-bye, not without a certain regret on my part. One of these days, I will take you and scatter you in your own domain, the rock-strewn slope where the sun is so hot. There you will find brothers and sisters who, hardly larger than yourselves, are already leading solitary lives under their little stones, sometimes no bigger than a thumb-nail. There you will learn the hard struggle for life better than you would with me.

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