n8 FROM AN EASY CHAIR 



than he came to it. The courtship of spiders is a very 

 interesting bit of natural history. The males execute a 

 sort of dance, and are strangely excited by the vibrating 

 note of a tuning fork. Two American naturalists, 

 Mr. and Mrs. Peckham, and also Dr. McCook, have 

 studied this subject in great detail. 



A strange-looking, dark green worm, as big as a 

 walnut, with a ribbon-like trunk six or eight inches in 

 length attached to its mouth, lives in holes in the rocks 

 in the Mediterranean. A similar worm has been found 

 off the Norwegian coast. Fanciful names are given by 

 zoologists to these two worms the first is called 

 Bonellia, the second Hamingia. It does no harm to 

 cite their names, and I do so with an apology to those 

 who do not like names. These goodly sized worms are 

 females, only females. For years the corresponding 

 male was unknown. At last a minute creature one- 

 eighth of an inch in length, like a tiny fragment of green 

 thread, was found crawling about on and into these big 

 green Bonellias. Its structure when it was examined 

 with the microscope proved it to be the adult male of 

 the worm on which it was crawling. It was so in- 

 significant and minute as to escape all observation 

 except that of a trained naturalist searching for it with a 

 magnifying glass. Some seven or eight of these diminu- 

 tive males are found on one female, infesting her as fleas 

 infest a mouse, and of about the same relative size. The 

 microscopic husband of the Norwegian Hamingia it w r as 

 my good fortune to discover many years ago, when I 

 was dredging marine animals in the deep waters of the 

 Stavanger Fjord. 



So there is nothing in the eternal fitness of things 

 proclaiming the male as the necessary superior of the 

 female throughout Nature. The fact is that the ques- 

 tion of equality and of general superiority and inferiority 

 has no place in regard to male and female from a 

 naturalist's point of view. It is true that women are so 



