“Natives of Brazil call the centipede the ambua. These creatures of a thousand legs, some of which are more than a foot long, bend as they crawl along and are reckoned very poisonous. In their going it is observable that on each side of their bodies every leg has its motion, one regularly after the other; being numerous, their legs have a kind of undulation and thereby communicate to the body a swifter progression than one would imagine where so many short feet are to take so many short steps that follow one another, rolling on like the waves of the sea.” The eighteenth century British naturalist Charles Owen was not alone in considering the millipedes and centipedes as kinds of snakes; nor in being confused, as naturalists still are, at their curious, complicated way of moving. There had been highly exaggerated reports. The Spaniard Ulloa, Columbus' gold assayer, described some centipedes he saw on the northern coast of South America as a yard long and six inches wide. Their bite, he contended, was fatal. “In the Kubbo-Kale valley,” reported British naturalist H. S. Wood in 1935, “I saw a centipede ten inches long. Its general color was electric blue with bright coral red fangs. It was the most terrible thing I have seen in my tramps through the forest.” Wood was stung by one of these Indian centipedes; he described the sensation as “exactly like that of a third degree burn.” These animals are neither snakes, insects nor worms. They constitute an independent and intermediate order of animal life. They are considered a little nearer to the spiders than to true insects. They have retained the ways of life of the ancestral worm. Most of the centipedes are active, ferocious, flesh-eating animals. Their poison fangs are deadly to their normal prey—earthworms and insects. Some of the larger species do not hesitate to attack lizards and small mice. A bite, however painful, probably never is fatal to a human. All are land animals which creep or crawl under logs and bark. They usually remain in seclusion during the day but come out of their retreats at night when they wander over the ground and attract attention to themselves by their phosphorescence. A few have been described as sea dwellers but these do not actually live in the water. They crawl along the shore and are submerged by each tide. Some or completely blind, others have many eyes. The centipedes are among the most repulsive of all animals, yet there are accounts of South American Indian children who drag very large ones out of the earth and eat them. Religious fanatics among North African Arabs swallow them alive as proof of their supernatural powers. Tropical America has many varieties with varied and curious habits, like the Nicaraguan species described by Thomas Belt: