196 



REVIEW OF REVIEWS. 



April 1, 1913. 



lost some of his own diaries, which had 

 been hidden in a cache, and were dis- 

 covered and gnawed by a bear. 



Such is the basis of one of the many 

 powerful stories of exploration in the 

 white North. There is grim intensity 

 in the tale of the struggle onward of 

 these two indomitable men. Their dogs 

 had gone, dying or being killed one by 

 one. They had picked up one food 

 depot, and then another, only to find 

 them cleared out. With little more than 

 the flesh of two dogs which had them- 

 selves come near to death by starvation, 

 with their sledge abandoned, their sleep- 

 ing bags gone, heavy with sickness, 

 they fought their way for a hundred 

 miles in a race with death, through a 

 land that yielded them no game. 

 " Hunger is all we feel, and food, food 

 our only thought. We run wherever 

 the beach is level enough, wading 

 through deep streams, heedless of the 

 wetting, and rounding steep, almost 

 sheer walls of cliff in a fraction of 

 the time it would take us under ordin- 

 ary circumstances." Delirious with 

 want of food, the two men go on and 

 on, finding two tins of soup at an 

 almost empty cache, and then arriving 

 at the hut of the expedition, only to 

 find their ship broken up and their com- 

 panions gone. There was nothing to 

 do but to face the winter in the hut. 

 Then, when summer came, by mischance 

 the only ship that called was never 

 seen, and another winter had to be spent 

 in solitude. In the ensuing summer a 

 ship came, a sealer, and the two men 

 were taken off to be brought back to 

 civilisation, ragged, unkempt, with long 

 beards after their twenty-eight months' 

 isolation, finding almost a childish 

 pleasure in every new^ incident of their 

 lives. Captain Mikkelsen's book takes 

 a high place for its interest amid the 

 accumulating volumes on Arctic ex- 

 ploration. 



SPIDERS. 



The Life of the Spider. By J. Henri 

 Fabre. (Dodd Mead.) 



This old French naturalist — he is 

 over ninety — besides being a great stu- 

 dent of Nature is also a delightful 

 writer. He lives in practical poverty, 

 but after his books brought him fame 



many admirers wanted to assist him. 

 He was poor, he said, that was true, but 

 he was quite happy. A modest shelter, 

 frugal food, and the delight of a Pro- 

 vencal garden, where he could observe 

 his beloved insects — what more could 

 an old man who loved Nature want ? 



The " Insect Homer " is Maeterlinck's 

 description of Fabre, who, he con- 

 siders one of the most profound 

 scholars, and one of the purest writers 

 of the century that is passed. Rostand 

 says of him that he thinks like a iDhilo- 

 sopher and writes like a poet. Maeter- 

 linck, who poetised the bee, writes the 

 preface for the man who poetises the 

 spider. In it we find the following 

 tragic little story: — 



There are some rather strange caterpillars 

 — the Processionaries, which are not rare; 

 and, as it happens, a single string of them, 

 five or six yards long, has just climbed down 

 from my umbrella pines, and is at this 

 moment unfolding itself in the walks of my 

 garden, carpeting the ground traversed with 

 transparent silk, according to the custom of 

 the race. To say nothing of the meteorolo- 

 gical apparatus of unparalleled delicacy 

 which they carry on their backs, these cater- 

 pillars, as everybody knows, have this re- 

 markable quality, that they travel only in 

 a troop, one after the other, like Breughel's 

 blind men or those of the parable, each of 

 them obstinately, indissolubly following it* 

 leader, so much so that our author having 

 one morning disposed the file on the edge of 

 a large stone vase, thus closing the circuit, 

 for seven whole days, during an atrocious 

 week, amidst cold, liunger and unspeak- 

 able weariness, the unhappy troop on its 

 tragic round, without rest, respite, or 

 mercy, pursued the pitiless circle until death 

 overtook it. 



To most readers M. Fabre reveals a 

 new world — one that has its comedies 

 and its tragedies, its wars, its slavery, 

 and its marriage rites. His acquaint- 

 ance amongst spiders is extensive. 

 Provence, which gave us the poet Mis- 

 tral and M. Fabre himself, evidently 

 abounds in such interesting families as 

 those of the Labyrinth Spider, the Crab 

 Spider, and the Black-bellied Taran- 

 tula, to say nothing of the common gar- 

 den spider, whose little tricks and clever 

 hunting devices are not the least inter- 

 esting. M. Fabre tells their stories with 

 a personal friendliness ; he evidently 

 would like to chide some of them for 

 their murderous propensities, but knows 

 that Nature will have her way. The 

 temptation to repeat some of these 



