The Life of the Spider 



and what the Spider puts into practice; she is 

 a past mistress of the secrets of rope-building, 

 without serving an apprenticeship. 



One would think that this interrupted and 

 apparently disordered labour must result in a 

 confused piece of work. Wrong: the rays 

 are equidistant and form a beautifully-regular 

 orb. Their number is a characteristic mark 

 of the different species. The Angular Epeira 

 places 21 in her web, the Banded Epeira 32, 

 the Silky Epeira 42. These numbers are not 

 absolutely fixed; but the variation is very 

 slight. 



Now which of us would undertake, off- 

 hand, without much preliminary experiment 

 and without measuring-instruments, to divide 

 a circle into a given quantity of sectors of 

 equal width? The Epeirae, though weighted 

 with a wallet and tottering on threads shaken 

 by the wind, effect the delicate division with- 

 out stopping to think. They achieve it by a 

 method which seems mad according to our 

 notions of geometry. Out of disorder they 

 evolve order. 



We must not, however, give them more 

 than their due. The angles are only approx- 

 imately equal; they satisfy the demands of 

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