Scorpion
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Scorpion. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
an animal allied to the spider. The scorpion has a large pair of feelers strikingly like the claws of a lobster or crayfish. These claws are used to seize spiders and large insects which the scorpion pursues at night with great activity. The last seven segments of the abdomen are extended like a tail. The last segment terminates in a sting with which the scorpion paralyzes its prey. When aroused, the scorpion brandishes its sting in a threatening manner. Scorpions are natives of warm or torrid countries. Some twenty species are found in the South. The sting of certain tropical species is represented to be fatal to man. In Rev. ix: 5 extreme pain is likened to "the torment of a scorpion when he striketh a man." The various species are from two to six inches in length. The people of southern Europe are careful to shake their shoes before they put them on, least a scorpion may have taken shelter in them. Scorpions are not rare in the arid regions of the Southwest. Mounted specimens are sold as curios. One dealer in Pasadena, California, claims to sell 5,000 scorpions a year. He employs Indians and boys to collect for him. See Tarantula ; Centipede ; Zodiac
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
in antiquity, a military engine, formerly used chiefly in the defense of a castle or town. It resembled the balista. In Scripture, a painful scourge; a kind of whip armed with points like a scorpion's tail. In zoology, any individual of the family Scorpionides. The European species are three or four inches long, and confined to the S. parts of the Continent, but scorpions have a wide geographical range in tropical and sub-tropical regions, and in Equatorial Africa and South America they grow to a length of 9 or 10 inches. The sting in the tropical species is much more formidable than that of the European scorpion. They are nocturnal in habit. They prey on spiders and other insects; and, seizing their prey in their palpi, which are practically useless as weapons of offense, sting it to death. The eggs are hatched in the enlarged oviducts, AM CAROLINA SCORPION and the young, usually from 40 to 60, are carried about for some time on the back of the mother.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The natural history in these accounts largely holds: scorpions are arachnids, nocturnal, they seize prey in their pincers and sting it, and Collier's 1921 note that the young are born live and ride on the mother's back is exactly right. Two things the writers did not know: scorpions glow a bright blue-green under ultraviolet light, a property only noticed by collectors in the mid-20th century and now the standard way to hunt for them at night, and their fossil record runs back more than 400 million years, making them among the oldest land animals known. Aiton's 1910 figure of "some twenty species" in the American South is far short — around ninety are now recognised in the United States, though only the Arizona bark scorpion is dangerous enough to kill, and an antivenom for it was licensed in the United States in 2011. Of roughly 2,000-plus species worldwide, only a couple of dozen have venom that seriously threatens a healthy adult.
Written for this edition, 2026.