THE TRIUMPH OF LIFE 



wall of the stone root work there trots through 

 the night a fearful enemy of its kind — the ivory 

 spider. It has itself, as a child of the night, 

 dispensed with its seeing apparatus, even to the 

 extent of the disappearance of the whole optical 

 nerve, but it touches and perceives sharply. An 

 encounter with this spider means the destruction 

 of the leptoderus. Sixty-eight forms of beetles 

 alone are found in this chalk cave of the moun- 

 tains. In addition there is a colorless cave snake, 

 twenty different kinds of spiders, four thou- 

 sand-legged worms and many orthopterous 

 insects.* Through the black water, which forms 

 a wide branching subterranean net-work of true 

 Hades-like streams, there swims the blind sala- 

 mander, flesh colored and like a great human 

 finger that of itself beckons ghostly to us. In 

 the horrible seas of the North American mam- 

 moth cave live blind fish and blind crabs, and on 

 the dark shores dwell blind grass-hoppers. Many i 

 times an accident has brought us sudden news/ 

 of these concealed existences, deep under our 

 feet, where no one dreamed of them. The raging 

 Cotopaxi volcano threw out with sudden vio- 

 lence, amid the boiling slime, great masses of 

 dead shad, as a sign that it had sucked out and 

 emptied subterranean reservoirs. When artesian 

 wells have been bored in North America, hith- 



"Insects having wing covers of a uniform texture throughout, 

 that generally overlap at the top when shut and under which 

 are the true wings which fold longitudinally like a fan. — ^Trans. 



125 



