SPIDERS AND MITES. 203 



CHAPTER XIII. 



SPIDERS AND MITES. 



Spiders, I am sure, are not favourites with you. With 

 the exception of the poor prisoner in the Bastille, who 

 had succeeded in taming a Spider, — the only creature 

 besides himself that inhabited his dungeon, — I do not 

 think I have ever heard of any one who loved or admired 

 Spiders morally. Yet, physically, we may find much to 

 admire in them, as net a few naturalists have done before 

 us ; there are men who have devoted their lives to the 

 study of this unamiable race, and who have discovered 

 in them the same wondrous skill, and the same perfect 

 adaptation of organ to function, of structure to habit, 

 that mark all God's works, whether we think them pretty 

 or ugly, amiable or repulsive. 



I am going to show you some of these pieces of mechan- 

 ism. Remember that the whole tribe is sent into the 

 world to perforin one business: they are commissioned 

 to keep down what would otherwise be a " plague of flies." 

 They are fly-butchers by profession • and, just as our 

 beef and mutton-butchers have their slaughter-house, 

 their steel, their knives, their pole-axe, their hooks, so 

 are these little slaughterers furnished with nets and 

 traps, with caves, with fangs, and hooks, and poison- 

 bags, ready for their constant work. They have, in fact, 

 nothing else to do : their whole lives are spent in 

 slaughtering, — with the exception of rearing fresh gene- 

 rations of slaughterers,— and I suppose they think, and 

 are intended to think, of nothing else. 



