8 Bulletin of the Brooklyn Entomological Society Vol. Xi 



lively, destroyed whole fields of crops. Its nature would be 

 unknown had not Hesychius, an Alexandrian grammarian of un- 

 certain date, explained that it developed into a Psyche — a Lepi- 

 dopterous insect. Surely, then, it was the larva of Noctuid or 

 Geometrid, probably the cut worm spreading in as many direc- 

 tions as ten fingers can point. 



The apparently ten-legged spider stands as a symbol for the 

 basis of all arithmetical computation. Ten thousand years be- 

 fore the Arabic numerals were invented the only . way that the 

 shepherd could tell the tale of his flock was by his fingers. Large 

 sums became multiples of the phalangia. The Zend people, 

 6,000 years B. C, were so simple that they could only count in 

 this way. To describe a rich man the Avesta spoke of him as 

 owning i,ooo Bactrian camels, i,ooo horses, i,ooo cattle, and 

 10,000 sheep. This last is beyond the counting power of the 

 shepherd. The princely warrior could conceive only one greater 

 number and he was compelled to call that " innumerable." He 

 prayed to the Goddess of the Irans that he might slay of the 

 Turan enemy — of those who had slain 10 he might slay 100, of 

 those who had slain 100 he might slay 1,000; of the thousand 

 killers that he might slay 10,000 ; and of the myriad slayers that 

 he might slay innumerable. When the armies of Xerxes assailed 

 Greece their numbers transcended imagination. They could only 

 be computed in the next phalangic multiple, millions. In all the 

 ancient battles the victors claimed the dead were in myriads or 

 multiples of the phalangic unit. 



The phalangic unit describes the ant, which is the mike of the 

 older Zend, the name amplified by the statement that it occurs in 

 colonies too numerous to be counted. Muria plus mike became 

 myrme.v. The Romans, losing sight of the root meaning of the 

 word, translated it phonetically as formica. The two English 

 words, which seem to be synonyms, are emmet (of which ant is 

 a mere contraction) and pismire. This is a compound word. 

 The last syllable was carried away in Indo-Germanic times and 

 is muria, ten thousand. The first syllable is due to the habit of' 

 certain species of ejecting formic acid when put on the defensive. 



Aristotle (331 B. C.) attempted a Httle personal observation 

 of spiders and has this to say: "All web-spinning spiders unite 



