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 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, 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.