Centipede

“ Lights might now be seen flitting about among the trees; the fire-flies and curious creeping things went gliding hither and thither on the ground, all ablaze with phosphorescent light. Yonder knobs of fire that jump about so mysteriously are beetles; that long line of fire wriggling snake-like at the tree foot is the dreaded brown centipede, whose bite is death. ”

“ An encounter between one of the smaller centipedes and a worm is like a fight between a ferret and a snake, so frantic is the writhing of the worm, so determined the hold which the hard and shiny centipede maintains with its hooked jaws. ”

“ For pity’s sake, some air—open a window!’ ‘Oh!’ cried a third, ‘I have become the slave of harmony. Why can it not leave my imagination to slumber in peace? I have seen white ants devouring their young; bees stinging each other; mosquitoes drawing blood from stones; centipedes committing suicide; charming butterflies metamorphosed into death’s-head moths.’
“ ‘Alas!’ said an old Cantharis, ‘what delight, what bliss to possess such genius! This centipede is truly wonderful! ”

“ No, perhaps not: it was only shrinking into itself under the heavy, heavy melancholy. Sham strength: was his body weak? No, not his muscles . . . but the worm was crawling about in his spine, the centipede was eating up his marrow. . . . And nobody in the wide world saw anything—of the centipede, of the worm, of all the horror of his life—even as nobody had seen anything of what had come about during the last few weeks between himself and his past: the last flare up of youth, Pauline. . . . Nobody saw anything. Life itself seemed blind. ”

“ Consequently, people are glad of any chance to kill centipedes,—usually taking a heavy stone or some iron utensil for the work;—a wooden stick is not a good weapon. There is always a little excitement when a bête-ni-pié (as the centipede is termed in the patois) exposes itself to death; and you may often hear those who kill it uttering a sort of litany of abuse with every blow, as if addressing a human enemy:—"Quitté moin tchoué ou, maudi!—quitté moin tchoué ou, scelerat!—quitté moin tchoué ou, Satan!—quitté moin tchoué ou, abonocio!" ”

“ But, Mary, there is another luminous insect, which some people mistake for the glow-worm: it is of a very disgusting shape, being a species of the centipede; it has, like that ugly insect, nearly fifty legs, on each side, and runs amazingly fast, leaving behind a long trail of greenish light. ”

“ Always so delighted with himself and the day's doings, as it chuckles over the thought of how vainly the six-foot snake tried to bite as he whisked it hundreds of feet in the air, and how green the centipede got in the face when he ferreted it out from our fire-wood stack and gobbled it, and so he croons himself to sleep to dream of children not bitten owing to its protecting care. ”

“ But perhaps you say legs in Sheffield.'
'We do that!' replied the Professor.
'You express yourself a little loosely in certain other respects,' I added. Obviously, a four-legged centipede is a contradiction of terms. This creature cannot be a real centipede. ”

“ Nothing daunted, Hidesato took another arrow, fitted it to the notch of the bow and let fly. Again the arrow hit the mark, it struck the centipede right in the middle of its head, only to glance off and fall to the ground. The centipede was invulnerable to weapons! When the Dragon King saw that even this brave warrior’s arrows were powerless to kill the centipede, he lost heart and began to tremble with fear.
The warrior saw that he had now only one arrow left in his quiver, and if this one failed he could not kill the centipede. He looked across the waters. ”

“ Upon this strip of land grows no verdure, and within its confines exists no life save the scorpion, the centipede, the tarantula, the hideous gila monster and rattlesnakes, all more deadly poisonous than sisters and brothers of the same family found elsewhere, each species a continual menace to the others in the never ending battle for life—vindictive conquerors at last being vanquished by more malignant foes. ”

“ More unpleasant by far is another many-legged creature, the centipede, whose sting is said to be exceedingly painful, resembling the puncture of a hot iron, and which is not uncommon in the interior as well as in the forest. The mere touch of its minute claws, if it happens to crawl over one, is said to produce pain and inflammation. ”

“ The Indians never kill the tarantula; but when it is found in camp, they carry it away with great care, and let it loose. If urged to destroy one of them they refuse, on the ground that if one is killed, its companions will revenge its death, by biting somebody's horse. The centipede would soon become so numerous that life would not be safe in Texas, if it were not for another species of reptile, the lizard—their active and deadly enemy. I have seen one of these animals attack a centipede as large as itself, kill it, and carry it to the top of a tree, and there devour it at leisure. ”

“ I remember seeing a huge oriental centipede exhibited in a herbalist's window in a large town in Yorkshire, as having been an inmate of the stomach of a human being.
I have heard the same story as that told me in Devon, repeated in Sussex with this variation, that instead of an earthworm tempting the newt from its retreat, a roast leg of mutton was exhibited at the mouth of the patient. A friend of mine was warned by an old woman in Staffordshire not to eat cress from a brook, on the ground that an acquaintance of hers had once thus swallowed toad-spawn which had been hatched within her. ”

“ And don’t ketch ’em for playthings, Lanky, don’t ketch ’em for playthings. Jest as well pet a rattlesnake. They’re flat yeller worms with a hundred legs, like fringe on each side, and on every foot there’s a little hook that the centipede can hook into things that he walks on. And them hooks is so pizenous that if he walks across your skin while he’s mad, your flesh will putrefy, and you’ll go as crazy as a locoed hoss, and like as not take to the bushes like a jackrabbit unless somebody holds you. ”

“ That was, of course, true, thought Ward. There were insects that could spin cables stronger in ratio than any alloy strands, could create acids that undermined stone and steel, could create cities that, in proportion, dwarfed human cities into significance; they had perfected telepathy; they could grow wings, develop gills and live in water as mud or marine worms, or fly in the air, or burrow into the land. Their superiority was accomplished through specialized millions of marvelous individual instincts.
The centipede moved close, and its ocelli gazed at Ward fixedly. Its many legs quivered. ”

“ It is marvellous to see them carrying away the body of a great dead roach or centipede,—pulling and pushing together like trained laborers, and guiding the corpse over obstacles or around them with extraordinary skill.... ”

“ A fairly familiar visitor in the southern United States is a house centipede which thrives in damp basements and sometimes invades ground floors. It is a wormlike creature, about an inch long, with fifteen pairs of long legs. In the female the last pair are twice as long as the rest of the body. ”

“ Again on the night of the next day the Impetuous-Male deity put him into the centipede and wasp-house; but as she again gave him a centipede and wasp-scarf, and instructed him as before, he came forth calmly. Again the Impetuous-Male deity shot a whizzing barb into the middle of a large moor, and sent him to fetch the arrow, and, when he had entered the moor, at once set fire to the moor all round. Thereupon, while he stood knowing no place of exit, a mouse came and said: "The inside is hollow-hollow; the outside is narrow-narrow." ”

“ Jack tossed out the centipede he had killed, and then looked among the waste paper for more, standing with his bare foot raised, and with ready slipper, for the bite of this insect, which grows to a large size in Porto Rico, is anything but pleasant, though it is said never to cause death, except perhaps in the case of some person whose blood is very much impoverished. ”

“ The giant centipede has been found in South America more than a foot long, and is capable of inflicting severe wounds, its tenacity being extraordinary and equalling that of the bull-dog when once it has gripped its enemy. ”

“ The flood had driven from the earth its multitude of creeping folk: snakes hung across the forks of trees, or basked on the branches; centipedes crawled upon floating rubbish; and many bushes were black to every tip with thronging ants. In one tree-hollow we surprised strange company — a pair of gorgeous dhaman snakes, three bran-new centipedes bright as copper, a most villainous-looking spider, and a gem of a frog, a little metallic creature that showed among the foul crew like the maiden among Comus’s companions. ”

“ Ballbody kept rolling up them and over them, confining his attentions to no one in particular; the scorpion kept grabbing at their legs with his huge pincers; a three-foot centipede kept screwing up their bodies, nipping as he went; varied as numerous were their woes. Nor was it long before the last of them had fled from the kitchen to the sculleries. But thither also they were followed, and there again they were hunted about. They were bespattered with the dirt of their own neglect ”

“ It is truly humiliating that "the crown of things" cannot defend himself against these minute enemies, and should be made as miserable as I am just now.
But it is a most healthy climate, and when I write of mosquitoes, land leeches, centipedes and snakes, I have said my say as to its evils. I will now confess that I was bitten by a centipede in my bath-house in Sungei Ujong, but I at once cut the bite deeply with a penknife, squeezed it, and poured ammonia recklessly over it, and in a few hours the pain and swelling went off. ”

“ In contrast to this arrangement, a centipede has a pair of legs on each of its many segments for the whole length of the body. The slow evolutionary change from such a many-legged ancestral form to a typical insect undoubtedly occurred by a gradual enlargement and strengthening of the front three pairs of legs and a reduction of the legs posterior to these. ”

“ Careless Nature, to bring them together, sacrificed a life. She sent a message down through a cleft in the rock against which Susannah was dejectedly leaning, and called from the depths where it had long been sleeping a poisonous red centipede. The creature crawled down over the girl’s shoulder and endeavoured to enter her sleeve at the wrist. Then Max saw it. He sprang forward in a spasm of terror, brushed the centipede aside with his hand ”

“ But a much more loathsome and a really dangerous creature is the large green centipede of the tropics. Of these things, the natives themselves have more horror than of any serpent whatever, not excepting the common cobra, and many a tale they have to tell you of people who have been bitten, and have soon after gone raving mad, and so died. They are from six to twelve inches in length, and just below the neck are armed with a powerful pair of sharp claws, like the nails of a cat, with which they hold on to their victim while they bite ”

“ A centipede with its creeping, horrible legs topped the mass of squirming matter; they could see the terrific sting of the creature, so deadly when but a fraction of an inch long, and which was now at least a foot, armed with poison.
There came the rush of more bats and moths, a rush that threw the three men off their feet. [382]
"We must have opened the hole more with our bombs," shrieked old Gurlone. "The dead bodies attract the other creatures, more and more of them are coming. It is impossible; we cannot deal with them all." ”

“ And then there are the Sand-hoppers and Woodlice.
The body of an Arthropod may be represented by a series of similar rings, thus:
This similarity is clearly apparent in the Centipede, but is concealed in the Beetle, the Shrimp, and [29] the Spider. It seems, at first sight, to be altogether lost in the Crab, and does really vanish in the adult stage of some parasitic Crustaceans.
It may be plausibly objected that our ideal Arthropod resembles nothing so much as a worm. In many respects this is true. A primitive Arthropod was worm-like, as is a Centipede. ”

“ Then came an adjournment to the bed-chamber and the pastime of writing up the day's journal with one hand and the destruction of mosquitoes with the other—a whole community of them at a slap. Then, observing an enemy approaching,—a hairy tarantula on stilts—why not set the spittoon on him? It is done, and the projecting ends of his paws give a luminous idea of the magnitude of his reach. Then to bed and become a promenade for a centipede with forty-two legs on a side and every foot hot enough to burn a hole through a raw-hide. ”

“ There is a lady present who has seen in one day a favourite black child bitten by a congereel, a large centipede in her nursery, a snake crawl from under her child’s pillow, and her son nearly die from a bite of the black spider with the red spot on its tail. ”

“ True, some of the centipede group can pinch rather sharply with their beetle-like jaws; and one, our largest and most common species, a brownish red fellow about three inches long and without eyes, can even draw blood if its jaws happen to strike a tender place. ”

“ In illustration of this, a sailor on board a West Indiaman was so severely wounded in the hand by a centipede, that his life was thought to be in danger; he was, however, eventually cured, by having roasted onions applied to the part affected. The workmen employed in pulling down old buildings, or in removing stacks of lumber, are also very often dreadfully bitten by these terrible creatures. ”