SPIDERS AND MEN. 277 



different species, affords the most striking parallel and proto- 

 type of all destructive beings,, from man himself (we might 

 even say, from the infernal spirit) through the descending 

 grades of quadruped, bird, reptile, animal flower, even to the 

 vegetable of fly-catching construction. Of our moral (or im- 

 inoral) selves, in our most ugly features, we have plenty of 

 portraitures clothed in fur, feathers, scales, which to us, through 

 Father Adam, owe all their reflected deformity. In our fierce- 

 ness, treachery, cunning, in every bad propensity, except two 

 of the worst avarice and pride which would seem exclusively 

 human and demoniac, we see ourselves tolerably repeated in the 

 wolf, the tiger, the fox, the bird of rapine, the crocodile, the 

 serpent, the shark, and other creatures instinctively evil, to- 

 wards which we feel, instinctively, dislike and dread, partly, 

 perhaps, because they are images so faithfully forbidding of our 

 worst selves. But where the creatures so universally unpopu- 

 lar as those of the genus Aranea ? and none, certainly, afford 

 such curiously exact copies of the genus Homo in its charac- 

 teristics of repulsion, not merely (as represented by other 

 animals) in evil dispositions, but in the particular modes of 

 their exhibition. Who labour assiduously, industriously, in- 

 geniously, for destruction of their prey, but men and spiders ? 

 What animals can construct nets and snares for entrapment of 

 their victims ? Only (with one or two insect exceptions) weaving 

 spiders, and human fishers and fowlers. Hidden from view 

 behind the gauzy screen afforded by her horizontal net, how 



