Centipede
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Centipede. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
sen'ti-ped, a class of animals allied to insects and crustacea. The centipede has a worm-shaped body of from 6 to 200 segments, with a head distinctly separated from the body by a neck. Each segment has a pair of legs, and the head bears a pair of antennae. Centipede means having one hundred feet. The millipede, or thousand legged worm, differs chiefly in having two pairs of legs on each segment, a body less flattened, and shorter antennae. The centipede lives on insects; the millipede on decaying wood. Our northern species are harmless. The centipede is useful in houses. It springs upon water-bugs and other insects, holding them down with its numerous legs until it has sucked the life out of them. The California centipede is from five to eight inches in length. It has twenty-two segments--twenty-two pairs of legs. Each "leg" ends in a sharp point. When angered the animal clasps its victim, driving all forty-four points into the flesh, stinging as if with hot needles. Boys mount and sell them as curiosities.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a genus of Myriopoda, having a long, slender, depressed body, protected by coriaceous plates, 21 pairs of legs, distinct eyes, 4 on each side, and antennæ with 17 joints. The name is, however, popularly extended to species of nearly allied genera. Centipedes run nimbly, feed on insects, and pursue them into their lurking places. They have not only a pair of horny jaws, like those of insects, but also another pair of organs closely connected with the mouth, and which are regarded as transformed legs, dilated and united at the base, terminated by a strong hook, and pierced beneath the extremity for the emission of a venomous fluid, which makes their bite quickly fatal to insects, and, in the case of the larger species, very painful, and even dangerous to the larger animals and to man.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Both accounts treat centipedes and millipedes as one class, "Myriopoda"; today they are separate classes within the subphylum Myriapoda — Chilopoda for centipedes, Diplopoda for millipedes — and about 3,000 centipede species are described. Collier's 1921 explanation of the venom was essentially right: the poison comes from the forcipules, a modified first pair of legs, not from the sharp leg tips as Aiton's 1910 account claims when it describes a California centipede driving "forty-four points into the flesh." One firm modern correction to the name: centipedes never have exactly 100 legs, because every species carries an odd number of leg-bearing segments, from 15 pairs to about 191. Collier's warning that a bite may be "quickly fatal" to man is now regarded as overstated — even the giant Amazonian Scolopendra gigantea, some 30 cm long, causes intense pain but human deaths are vanishingly rare — while Aiton's praise of the house centipede as a useful hunter of insects still stands.
Written for this edition, 2026.