The only direct evidence which has come to me regarding the bite of the hundred-legged crawler was from an English naturalist whom I met in Venezuela. He was bitten on the ankle by a centipede nearly a foot long. So severe was the laceration that his sock was clotted with blood before he could get it off. The two punctures were marked. Almost immediately the ankle began to swell. The pain he describes as being equal to a bad toothache. It kept him awake all that night. He had some fever, which, however, he attributes rather to the loss of sleep than to any specific action of the poison, as there were no other general symptoms. In the morning the pain had abated a good deal, and he believes that he could have gone about his pursuits had he been able to get his sock and shoe on. He noted some discoloration about the wound. Late in the afternoon he was hobbling about. A week in a carpet slipper was the extent of disability which he suffered. On these evidences it would seem just, for the present, to set down the scorpion and the centipede as painful, rather than dangerous, assailants.

   Diseased imagination could invent no creature more horrific of appearance than the tarantula. Its bristling and hostile aspect, the swift ferocity of its rush, its great size, and its enthusiastic preference for combat as against flight, are sufficient to account for the fear and respect in which it is generally held. But, though several species of the huge spider are native to the United States, and others frequently drop out of banana bunches from South or Central America, to the discomfiture of the unsuspecting grocer, no authentic instance of death from tarantula poison in this country is obtainable. St. Louis papers please copy, particularly that one which, several years ago, announced in appropriately black headlines:

IN TWO WEEKS
Three Men Have Died From Bites of Tarantulas,

proceeding to explain that the victims were banana handlers in the wholesale fruit district. No names were supplied -- a common phenomenon in this class of obituary notice. Search in the coroner's records failed to bring to light any case of the sort, and an exhaustive inquiry in the fruit district was equally unproductive. The report was a pure fake.

   Apparently of the same nature is the "news story" of a Californian who, presumably mistaking a tarantula for a fragrant floweret, was bitten on the nose and "died in great agony." That, of course, is the proper way to die under such circumstances. They all do it -- in print.

   Now let us see about the "agony." H............