Now how does this liberation take place? I enjoy the remarkable privilege of witnessing it. I see the mother with the point of her mandibles delicately seizing, lacerating, tearing 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 when eating the fetal wrappers. Not a scratch on that scarce-formed flesh, not a strain, in spite of the clumsiness of the tool employed. I cannot get over my surprise: the Scorpion has initiated the living into acts of maternity bordering on our own. In the distant days of the coal vegetation, when the first Scorpion appeared, the gentle passions of childbirth were already preparing. The egg, the equivalent of the long-sleeping seed, the egg, as already possessed by the reptile 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, in the heart of 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 ebb and flow. Life, that other ocean, more unfathomable than the ocean of the waters, has its ebb and flow likewise. Will it have any others? Who can say that it will? Who can say that it will not? If the sheep were not to assist by swallowing the wrappers 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, move about helplessly in the half-torn ovarian sac and are unable to free 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 integument of an onion-skin. The young chick has a temporary callosity at the end of its beak, which it uses to peck, to break the shell. The young Scorpion, condensed to the dimensions of a grain of rice to economize space, 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 lingers behind of the now useless tatters; everything has returned to the mother’s stomach; and the spot of ground that has received the laying is swept absolutely clear.