XTX. SPIDERS. 275 



deavour to make a meal of your suitor, and often not 

 unsuccessfully, is carrying the great division above 

 mentioned just a little too far. May one venture to hope 

 that, just as the love-sick swain would rather have his 

 ears boxed by his Phyllis than remain unnoticed and 

 uncared-for, so the lovelorn young spider may say, " Better 

 by far to be eaten by her I love than to rouse in her no 

 spark of enthusiastic interest." We must not look into 

 these moral idiosyncrasies with too close and too human 

 an eye. In any case the females of civilised Spiderland 

 are not responsible for the murder of millions of innocent 

 butterflies that they may .decorate their bonnets with 

 pretty bits of wing. The fair young spider who had just 

 eaten her third suitor would, perhaps, contentedly thank 

 Providence that none of her race had sunk so low as that. 

 It must not, of course, be supposed that I really think 

 that a spider is capable of passing a moral judgment on 

 the thoughtless girl who passes by with a humming-bird 

 in her hat. The spider acts out her instinctive impulses, 

 but she has not, as I believe, the faculty of reflecting on 

 them and pronouncing them good or bad. In putting 

 pretty feathers in her hat, the girl too is acting out her 

 instinctive impulses ; but she can reflect on them ; she 

 can frame an ideal self which she would strive, as far as 

 possible, to realise in her actual life ; she can put before 

 herself the question, " Which shall I strive to be, a girl 

 with a hat made beautiful by the sacrifice of the joyous 

 life of a bird, or a girl who is content to renounce this 

 piece of self-gratification as a token and symbol that she 

 loves God's creatures ? " And so, little maiden, the great 

 difference between you and the spider is this, that while 

 you both have bad impulses, she to eat her lovers and you, 

 perhaps, to gratify your vanity, the poor spider has no 

 higher standard by which to judge and purify her actions. 



T 2 



