Paraguay also produces some harmless ones, which are either devoid of poison, or the desire to use it, unless they be offended. Who does not know that some serpents lay eggs, whilst others produce a numerous living offspring? The Americans believe that young serpents grow from the dead bodies of the old ones. Hence, whenever they kill any serpents they remove them to a great distance from their houses, and do not throw them on the ground, but hang them on trees or hedges. In Brazil, two Jesuit missionaries found a horrid-looking dead snake to which a young live one was clinging, and, on their shaking the carcass with sticks, eleven little serpents crawled from it. This account of serpents is closed by three insects, akin to each other in the quality of their venom. The Scolopendra, which has a smooth cylindrical body a span long, twice as thick as a man's thumb, and covered with a hard, cinereous skin, approaching to a cartilage, abounds with legs from head to foot, which I neither had power nor inclination to count. It contains a poison almost equal to that of a serpent, and its bite causes much both of pain and danger. After spending eighteen years in Paraguay, I at length saw and felt an animal till then known to me only by name. It bit me as I was asleep, and on waking, I perceived that the space between the little and ring-finger, first looked red, and afterwards began to swell and grow painful. The tumour and inflammation hourly increasing, I could no longer doubt but that some venomous little animal had bitten me. Early in the night I heard an unusual noise amongst some tools that were lying under a bench in my room. Bringing a light, I discovered and killed the Scolopendra which had bitten me, and next day suspended it in our court-yard, and showed it to the Indians, who all declared that they had often seen and dreaded that animal in houses, fields, and banks of rivers. Do not confound the Scolopendra with the Oniscus, which is a dusky round worm, two inches in length, and scarce thicker than a goose's quill. The body is covered with rough yellow hairs. On the head you see here and there a double row of white spots. It has eight short thick feet. Whichever part of the body it touches it violently inflames, which certainly proves it to be venomous. The Paraguayrian scorpions are said to differ nothing from those of Europe in appearance, but their poison is milder and more easily cured. I think that scorpions must be very rare in Paraguay, since, after spending eighteen years there, and traversing greatest part of the province, I never saw one, nor heard of any person's being bitten by one. I remember that a Spaniard appointed to guard the cattle in the town of Concepcion, when lying sick at our house, was frightened by a scorpion, which put out its head two or three times from the wall, and that he passed a sleepless night in consequence, always keeping a knife in his hand against the threatening animal.