In captivity, and, no doubt, under nature too, when they happen to come across them, scorpions will eat cockroaches, but a cockroach is not altogether a defenceless creature, and sometimes a large one will give battle, and even with success. The weapons upon which, in these cases, it relies are its powerful hind legs armed, as they are, with spines which project backwards. Backwards accordingly it advances upon the scorpion, and increasing its pace suddenly, when at the requisite distance salutes the astonished enemy with a shower of kicks. So unexpected is this mode of assault that it is sometimes effective, even against so redoubtable an opponent as a scorpion, whilst a tarantula spider has been known to fly, panic-stricken, before or rather behind a large cockroach. But such efforts, however heroic, can have only a transient success, where the conditions are so unequal. Jaws and sting must prevail against soft bodies armed only with spiny legs. “_Alla stoccata_ carries it away.” Generally the poor cockroach is seized—sometimes, in the first instance, by the antennæ—as it comes inadvertently too near to the scorpion, or even trespasses upon its back. At once the tail is bent above it, and the fatal sting enters its body. Paralysis ensues, and would no doubt be quickly followed by death, even were the scorpion, thereupon, to retire. As it is, however, it is difficult to say whether the victim dies more of the sting or of being eaten. From the latter process, at any rate, there is no recovery, as may be seen in the case of smaller cockroaches, upon whom the scorpion, from motives of economy, does not always waste its poison. It merely, when thus provident, holds the contemptible creature in its claws, whilst bringing to bear upon it its two pairs of chelæ or real jaws, which act upon the same principle as those of _Galeodes vorax_, if the reader remember. It feeds in a leisurely manner, the impatience of the cockroach not affecting it in the least. Two hours for a good-sized one—a _pièce de résistance_—is not considered too long by the scorpion. Scorpions, it appears, use their stings in a very careful, deliberate manner. It is not a mere random thrust with them, lunged in anywhere, just as the body of an insect happens to come. On the contrary, they feel about this body, most anxiously, with their tail, till they have found a soft spot in it, and then introduce their sting in a careful manner. In fact, they sting an insect in much the way that Isaak Walton impaled a frog upon the hook—“tenderly as if they loved him”—and for the same class of reason, viz. to make a workmanlike job of it, and not break their stings against the harder parts of its body, for the point of this weapon is delicate and might get chipped against the hard shards of a beetle, or other such resisting surface.