The Life of the Spider 



goes down to the thorax, nor stops till she 

 comes to the hind-legs, which she deems too 

 tough. She then pushes away the unfortu- 

 nate remains, while a new lover, who was 

 quietly awaiting the end of the monstrous 

 banquet, heroically steps forward to undergo 

 the same fate. 



J. H. Fabre is indeed the revealer of this 

 new world, for, strange as the admission may 

 seem at a time when we think that we know all 

 that surrounds us, most of those insects mi- 

 nutely described in the vocabularies, learnedly 

 classified and barbarously christened had 

 hardly ever been observed in real life or thor- 

 oughly investigated, in all the phases of their 

 brief and evasive appearances. He has devoted 

 to surprising their little secrets, which are the 

 reverse of our greatest mysteries, fifty years 

 of a solitary existence, misunderstood, poor, 

 often very near to penury, but lit up every 

 day by the joy which a truth brings, which is 

 the greatest of all human joys. Petty truths, 

 I shall be told, those presented by the habits 

 of a spider or a grasshopper. There are 

 no petty truths to-day; there Is but one truth, 

 whose looking-glass, to our uncertain eyes, 

 seems broken, though its every fragment, 

 30 



