July runs to an end, August and September pass and nothing more occurs to swell my collection. The period of the family, therefore, for both Scorpions is the second fortnight in July. From that time onward, everything is finished. And yet, among my guests in the glass cage, there remain females as big and fat as those from whom I have obtained an offspring. 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 pregnancy, very singular in the case of an animal of an inferior order. I transfer each mother and her product, separately, into medium-sized receptacles, which facilitate the niceties of the 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 belly. 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 learned expression lacks exactitude: the young do not see the light directly with the formation which we know of. And this must be so. How would you have the outstretched claws, the sprawling legs, the shrivelled tails go through the maternal passages? The cumbrous little animal could never pass through the narrow outlets. It must needs come into 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 anatomy 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, easy-gliding, oval lump leaves not the smallest 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 so many in the Black Scorpion’s. Interfering too late in the nocturnal lying-in, 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.