SPIDER 



657 



Slavery (1884), a bitter attack on the increasing 

 tendency to socialism. Much of the time taken up 

 in writing controversial articles might have been 

 applied to the completion of his system, leaving it 

 to fight its own battle, on its merits or demerits, 

 against the attacks of opponents. In addition to 

 these he has written many magazine papers, bearing 

 on various points of his system. 



Of his separate works, however, much the most 

 important is his Descriptive Sociology, which was de- 

 signed to be a complete repertory of facts in relation 

 to the structure, habits, beliefs, and other conditions 

 of society, of all grades and characters, ancient and 

 modern, savage, barbarous, and civilized ; these facts 

 to be arranged in tabular form, for easy comparison 

 and reference. Tlie plan as laid out involved im- 

 mense labor, far beyond his own powers and op- 

 portunities, and he engaged three assistants, adapted 

 by their culture and information to the work. The 

 original plan proposed a work in 18 parts, of which 

 several have been published, including No. 1, a de- 

 scriptive sociology of the English civilization ; No. 

 2, the extinct American civilizations; No. 3, the 

 Negrito and Malay races ; No. 4, the African races, 

 etc. The restricted sale of the work and the great 

 expense of the undertaking forced him to limit it to 

 9 numbers, extensive unpublished materials remain- 

 ing in his hands. This work, covering a wide range 

 of social facts, is of great value so far as it goes, and 

 its completion in accordance with the original de- 

 sign would make it an invaluable work of reference, 

 replete with facts of sociology nowhere else to be 

 found in such completeness and convenience of ar- 

 rangement. 



_ It is not our purpose to attempt any critical re- 

 view of the great work of Spencer's life, his system 

 of philosophy. It has called forth a vast array of 

 critical opinions, favorable and unfavorable. It has 

 been proved by later investigation that some of the 

 supposed facts on which his arguments were based 

 are not facts at all ; certain of his positions have 

 been invalidated ; several of his theories are very 

 unlikely to be accepted, much of his reasoning 

 has been met by equally cogent counter-reasoning. 

 Yet all these are but a'tacks upon the outworks ; 

 the central citadel of his system, the evolutionary 

 hypothesis, still stands firm. A wider and wider 

 circle of scientists and thinkers in general have ac- 

 cepted the system, but it has not yet been decided 

 what will be the eventual conclusion of cultivated 

 mankind. The philosophical system of Herbert 

 Spencer claims to be the most solidly based of any 

 now in existence, as the only strictly inductive sys- 

 tem the world possesses. Modern philosophers may 

 be divided into two classes on national lines of sepa- 

 ration, the several German systems being all deduc- 

 tive, and attending far more to conclusions than to 

 facts ; the English, and after them the French, being 

 essentially inductive, ami considering facts as of pri- 

 mary, conclusions of secondary, importance. Of the 

 several English and French systems, however, this 

 is most particularly the case with that of Herbert 

 Spencer. His idea of evolution was gradually worked 

 out through diligent study and widespread compari- 

 son of the facts discovered by science, beginning 

 with its application to the laws of society, and gradu- 

 ally extending, as his studies widened, till it embraced 

 the whole universe. This gradual growth, through 

 the study of scientific facts, is essentially different 

 from the deductive method of reasoning out a uni- 

 versal principle to begin with and then seeking sup- 

 port for it in facts. In the explication of his system, 

 however, Spencer has been forced to adopt the latter 

 method, first applying his theory to the basic condi- 

 tions and relations of the universe, and then seeking 

 their support in recorded facts. The latter labor 

 constitutes the bulk of his work, which seems to 



j many overloaded with illustrative particulars, every 



' step of the gradually unfolding argument being sup- 

 ported by an extensive array of quoted illustrations, 

 and the whole work founded on a broad basis of the 



' phenomena ascertained and recorded by modern sci- 



! ence. 



That any speculative philosophical theory can be 

 indubitably established in this or any other manner 

 cannot be affirmed. There may be no chance for two 

 opinions respecting the characters of a mineral body, 

 but the primary cause of gravitation, of animal de- 



! velopment, etc., will always be open to a diversity 

 of opinion, and dozens of theories in regard to the 

 same phenomenon may be honestly entertained and 

 susceptible of some degree of corroborative evi- 

 dence. Yet the fact remains that the theory which 

 accords with the greatest number of observed phe- 

 nomena, which offers the most satisfactory explana- 

 tion of nature's mysteries, and which meets with the 

 fewest discordant phenomena, has the soundest 

 standing as a law of the universe. Spencer has 

 earnestly labored to sustain his theory by illustra- 

 tions drawn from every field of science, and mar- 

 shalling accordances into a cumulative array of evi- 

 dences ; though not until all facts are known, and 

 all shown to be in strict accordance with a proposed 

 law of nature, can an irrefutable system of philoso- 

 phy be established. 



As a logician and a thinker of broad grasp and 

 deep powers of analysis and synthesis, Herbert 

 Spencer has had few equals in the history of man- 

 kind. He is generally conceded to have unusual 

 mastery of method, breadth of view, and capacity of 

 organizing ideas, and none of his positions are easy 

 of overthrow, however strong in fact and argument 

 be his opponents. 



Spencer, as has already been stated, is in imper- 

 fect health. His health was so broken when he bo- 

 pan his great work that few of his friends believed 

 that he would be able to go on with it, and of recent 

 years he has been virtually obliged to abandon it, 

 though he may yet live to complete it. He is a 

 bachelor, living in a quiet boarding-house in the 

 West End of London, and so careful and systematic 

 in all his habits, literary and otherwise, that he has 

 been enabled to do far more work than would other- 

 wise have been possible to him. Ho visited America 

 in 1882 and delivered some lectures, though soon 

 obliged to give up all exertion in consequence of ill- 

 health. In London he is a jegular frequenter of 

 the Athenaeum Club, and makes billiards, concerts, 

 and theatrical entertainments his principal amuse- 

 ments, alternated with long country-rambles, of 

 which he is very fond. Ho has persistently refused 

 to join scientific societies or accept university honors, 

 or to yield to anything which might distract him 

 from the chosen work to which ho has devoted his 

 life and strength. (c. M.) 



SPIDER, an arthropod animal of the family 

 Araneidea, order Arachnida, this order 

 Se | y'- H. embracing also the mites and scorpions. 

 Am. Rep T The Araclmida seem intermediate be- 

 tween the Crustaceans and Insects, dif- 

 fering from the latter in the close union of the head 

 and thorax, the possession of simple eyes only, and 

 the absence of antennae and wings. There is no 

 transformation, the young being born with the form 

 and instincts of the adult. Maturity is reached after 

 six moultings of the skin. The spiders possess four 

 pairs of legs, an unsegmented and more or less 

 spherical abdomen, and respire by means of both 

 lungs and tracheae. They are all carnivorous, and 

 are provided with mandibles adapted to aid in tak- 

 ing their pvey, the mandible ending in a powerful 

 hook and being supplied with a poison-duct. The 

 ocelli, or simple eyes, number 8, 6, or 2, in different 

 species. 



