832 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the hosts of the air, but to be bred for her, and every day she is to 

 be placed in the stocks and compelled to give up her silk. This 

 plan may possibly be feasible, but the space and the labor required 

 would make the silk so costly that it could not compete with the 

 product of the contented and simple-minded silkworm. 



In fact, the spider, like the cat, is a self-reliant being, who will 

 submit to petting, will become perfectly tame, so long as the friend- 

 ship is reciprocal, but will never be made a slave to serve our 

 whims. Her sturdy independence, her ability to take care of her- 

 self and to go where she pleases, were long ago recognized ; for 

 doth not the wise man of old say, " The spider taketh hold with 

 her hands, and is in kings' palaces " ? 



HEARING IN THE LOWER ANIMALS. 



By M. PIEEEE BONNIEE. 



SLOW as we have been in recognizing that man owes the supe- 

 riority of his form and his attributes to the experience of his 

 entire animal ancestry, we have been prompt to attribute to other 

 animals psychical and sensorial qualities more or less nearly 

 identical with ours. There really seems to be some insolence in 

 assuming that hearing, as we enjoy it, is refused to the immense 

 majority of living beings, and especially to all the invertebrates. 

 This arises partly from the fact that we are hardly acquainted 

 with our own senses, and that many of our faculties are still left 

 for us to discover while we use them in a way as constant as un- 

 conscious, and partly from our natural tendency to base on dis- 

 tant organic analogies functional assimilations which are far from 

 being always admissible. 



Here is a pigmentary spot to which we assign the dignity of 

 the eye; there, a hair, an otocyst, which we call the auditory 

 organ ; and at the same time we assume that the spot is for seeing 

 and the hair for hearing. As sight and hearing are known to us 

 only as we have them, there results a deplorable misinterpreta- 

 tion of the sensorial function in animals. 



Can we, however, have any conception of the power of smell 

 of a ray or a rat ? Are there not some insects which can supply 

 the place of nearly all the other senses by the richness of their 

 smell ? And do we, aerial animals, know anything about the 

 kind of sense of smell that water animals have ? 



The comparative physiology of the sight would show curious 

 differences between us and any animal. Ants might have theories 

 respecting luminous undulations that would seem very strange to 

 us. Do they know what we understand by color ? Do they com- 



