some type of adult girl

historieofbeafts:

I was just about to post this (helpfully labelled) scorpion from the Ortus sanitatis, so not only are you not bothering me, you actually have pretty great timing!

Amazingly, not the least threatening scorpion illustration I’ve encountered, an honour which goes to these little guys:

[British Library, Harley MS 3244, fol. 64r]

Fact-wise, Edward Topsell provides a wealth of information about scorpions in his Historie of Serpents:

• Scorpions come in 7 flavours: white, reddish, pale, greenish, blackish-pale, Crab & honey.
• The association with crabs is so strong that Pliny says scorpions are born whenever a crab dies and washes up on a beach.
• In fact, it’s so easy to generate a scorpion that they also grow from rot, crocodile eggs, basil, the brains of people who smell too much basil, dead basilisks & “corrupt” rainwater.
• A scorpion’s greatest joy in life is to wash itself all over with its tongue and then roll around in clean linen:

[They have also tongues, wherewithall they use often to lick and smooth over their own bodies. And seeing of all other things they love fresh and clean linnen, whereinto they insinuate, and wrap themselves when they can come unto it, then also first of all they cleanse their whole bodies all over with their tongues, and next to their flesh put on this clean linnen, as a man would put on a shirt.]