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he was afraid he should destroy some popular fallacies in 

 the matter of spiders . When we spoke of these animals, 

 we called them insects, hut in reality they were not so. The 

 spiders lay between the insect group, and were called 

 arachnidae. What in reality was an insect ? Insects pos- 

 sessed no back bone. Those creatures which possessed a 

 back bone were called vertebrate, and those which did not 

 were called invertebrate. The insects were built up of a 

 series of rings, and it was called an insect, because it had 

 the appearance of being cut. Then the insect breathed by 

 the tracheae through spiracles, the system being illustrated 

 in a very pleasing manner by Col. Cox, by means of dia- 

 grams. An insect possessed six legs ; it also underwent a 

 state of metamorphoses— it came out of an egg, and was 

 then called a caterpillar, and it then underwent two, three, 

 or four changes, until it reached the perfect state. The 

 spider, on the contrary, was an invertebrate animal, and 

 might be summed up, scientifically, as an articulate inver- 

 tebrate animal, breathing sometimes by lungs and some- 

 times by the trachea. It possesses no antenna, but has 

 from six to ten legs, and undergoes no metamorphoses. 

 From this enumeration, it would be seen that it differed in 

 many respects from the insect tribe. Then the eye of the 

 insect was also different from that of the spider- in the 

 latter there was no separation of the head from the body. 

 In the insect the eye was always placed on the side of the 

 head— in the spider on the top of the head. This complex 

 organ of vision was also described fully by Col. Cox on the 

 black-board and by diagrams, which, of course, we can- 

 not re-produce. The lecturer then described at 

 considerable length the hybernation of insects, and then 

 showed a most beautiful specimen of the nest 

 of the spider, cieniza nidulans, in a perfect 

 state of preservation and almost translucent. The male and 

 female cteniza were also shown much enlarged by means of 

 the microscope. Speaking of some extraordinary charac- 

 teristics of the arachnidae tribe, Colonel Cox remarked 

 that if a leg was taken away it grew on again. Then this 

 order merged into another, sometimes by imperceptible 



