Feb., 1916 Bulletin of the Brooklyn Entomological Society 7 



tapestry effects depicting the failings of the Gods. By all ac- 

 counts her work compared well with that of the Goddess, but 

 who can stand against high Olympus ? A tap of Athene's wand 

 and the mortal became a spider and her handiwork the radiat- 

 ing web the centre of which was to be her perpetual home. 



A spider gave the central idea of the great Homeric poem, the 

 Odyssey. The essential word here is penizo, which seems to 

 mean weaving in some way that is easily unraveled, perhaps 

 knitting. Penelope is the spider-eyed weaver, who stays at home 

 constructing each day a work to be undone each night. Odysseus 

 was the wanderer, the typical male of the species.- 



When Xenophon spoke of what is undoubtedly a spider he 

 used the word phalanx. Aristotle recognizes two groups of 

 spider, arachncB and phalangia, the latter including the harvest- 

 men still known as Phalangidse, having long legs. Here, then, 

 is an entirely different metaphor, accentuating the eight legs and 

 two mandibles. The word phalanx (plural phalangai) has had a 

 curious career. Its first significance is the ten fingers of the two 

 hands. By Homer's time it was restricted to ten particular joints 

 in the hands, as it is now. In the singular, phalanx, Homer uses 

 the word to mean a body of men in close array for offence and 

 defence, so combined to remind one of two hands with ten ex- 

 tended fingers. This significance has ever since clung to the 

 word. 



In the nebulous portion of Greek antiquity some huge octopus, 

 perhaps not unlike those still inhabiting the northern seas but 

 long extinct in the Mediterranean, came to that shore and found 

 victims enough to make it long remembered. Some eye witness, 

 describing the creature, used his two hands with extended fingers 

 as an illustration. It was like a huge phalanx, he said. Thus it 

 came to have a name — phalsena. The name became applied to 

 the next sea monster. The whale, also, has been extinct in the 

 Mediterranean during all historic time, but the ancestors of the 

 Romans remembered the creature and adopted the Greek name as 

 halcena. Of that particular balccna whose enforced guest was the 

 Hebrew, Jonah no acquaintance could be more desirable. 



The original phalcena was a devastator from the sea. The 

 Greeks passed the name on to a land devastator which, collec- 



