Arachne and the Poets. 207 



The knowledge of this prevalence of spiders goes some 

 way to give a just appreciation of insect life. At any rate, 

 without it, any idea of that life must be as ridiculously 

 incomplete as if we were to think of mice in kitchens without 

 cats and traps. 



For myself, I know this perpetual recurrence of spiders 

 and their webs in every crook and cranny of the country 

 makes me think of insect existence as anything but careless. 

 It rather seems to me a constant ambuscade. Fortunately, 

 the flies do not know it, or I should think they would 

 abondon life in despair ; and fortunately, too, they have no 

 nerves, or they would go mad with horrors and the appre- 

 hension of them. To me, then, there is always present in 

 the quietest scenes in nature an underlying grimness which 

 makes insect life very real and serious. 



The birds seem merely an awkward incident in fly-life ; 

 their prodigious havoc among the winged things only 

 occasional and local as compared with the ubiquitous and 

 universal spiders'. The former, no doubt, are active and 

 voracious and very numerous. But what is their activity, 

 voracity, or their numbers by comparison with the myriads 

 of these little, subtle, and nimble blood-suckers ? They are 

 everywhere among the grass, in the herbage, the under- 

 growth, the shrubs, the trees, in the hedges and the ditches, 

 on railings, tree-trunks, walls, and the ground; creeping, 

 hiding, web-spinning, leaping, they cover the earth in a 

 universal conspiracy. 



Darwin's revelation of that awful force, the earth-worm, 

 revolutionised my ideas of the under-world. Till then I 

 had considered it inert or passive, the solid basis and 

 ground-work of the shifting, active life of the upper-world. 

 I had never regarded it as itself a scene of a pitiless diligence 

 in ruin, the laboratory of a vast disintegrating agency that is 

 incessantly toiling to bury cities and destroy every vestige 

 of man's occupation of the earth. 



