Spiders digest most of their food before eating. They must subsist on a liquid diet. A powerful digestive fluid from the stomach is discharged on the prey. This completely liquifies the soft tissues. So potent is this fluid that spiders sometimes can devour small back-boned animals, such as fish and lizards, which they kill with their poison fangs. One African species can liquify almost completely a fish two inches long in less than three hours. Another has been observed in captivity to dispose of small snakes in the same way. _The Suicide Instinct of Iguanas_ Some iguanas seem to have the ability to commit suicide without any visible means. Some of these lizards, hitherto unknown to science, captured alive and uninjured in Cuba by Dr. Paul Bartsch of the Smithsonian Institution, died a few minutes later as if a mere wish to end their lives were sufficient to achieve death. “These iguanas are vegetable feeders,” Dr. Bartsch recorded in his field notes. “They are fairly tame and persisted in chasing the nooses on the ends of our sticks, instead of running their heads through them or letting us place them around their necks. When hard-pressed they finally dash into holes that look like huge crab burrows. When near the coast, where there is a hurricane rampart, they seek refuge in crevices of the rocks. We were surprised when we took those we had captured from our bag on board ship to find four of them dead. Evidently they have a way of ending their own lives.” On Petite Gonave Island off the coast of Haiti are large iguanas which—native fishermen say—can be captured safely only by getting them drunk. Travellers are warned that they are extremely dangerous animals when sober. The fishermen pour rum into hollows of rocks along the shore. The big lizards appear to be very fond of this beverage and drink themselves helpless. _Forests That Eat Meat_ Relic groves of the great meat-eating forests of 150,000,000 years ago still thrive on the floors of deep, warm seas. These are made up of plant-animals—predacious trees with red blood and hearts—the crinoids. There are about 700 extant, compared to more than a thousand extinct, species. For a hundred million years they were among the ocean’s dominant life forms. Fossil crinoids, or “stone lilies,” make up great marble beds in both American and Europe. In 1934 the Smithsonian Johnson expedition dredged nineteen species, including two not hitherto known to science, from the bottom of the great Porto Rico Deep. The crinoids are highly developed animals, although they look like plants. They can by no means be considered as a form of life on the dividing line of the animal and vegetable worlds. Rather they are animals which have taken on the superficial appearance of plants. They are very highly specialized animals—so much so that there are few places in the world where they can survive in great numbers.