SPIDERS AND MEN. 279 



Bruin or King Lion ; while in her apparent indifference to 

 torturing tests of vitality she enacts a part as closely resembling 

 those of the martyr and the American Indian. 



This latter characteristic of seeming insensibility, which is 

 exhibited in an equal degree, under the same circumstances, by 

 the pertinacious Death-watch,"* is one (in an insect) of a very 

 curious description. In what can it have its source? Not 

 certainly in anything of resemblance to that iron will, whether 

 strengthened by devotion or pride, which has imparted of its 

 own firmness to nerves and muscles under the scalping-knife 

 or at the stake. One can hardly, indeed, suppose this inflexi- 

 ble resistance of pain to be, in the insect, a quality of mind 

 (animal mind) at all, but would suppose it rather to be a 

 deadening of the senses at the torpedo touch of alarm, a cor- 

 poreal cloak of actual insensibility kindly wrapped by Nature 

 around a creature armed with no weapons of defence. Thus 

 regarded, the death-like seeming of the spider is an involuntary 

 affection, not a feint ; her quietude under mangling and maim- 

 ing, an indifference, not assumed, but real. But even on a 

 supposition like this, her practices in the above, as in other 

 particulars, are more closely representative of those of the 

 human than of any other animal. 



Again, it has been said and sung, that even the wild beasts 

 spare their kind, the destroyer Man alone turning " his fierce 

 pursuit on man." This is not true, the assertion being con- 



* Anobium pertinax. 



