o reel out the silk from the silk-glands, the tip being
perforated by a myriad of little tubes through which the silk escapes in
excessively fine threads. An ordinary thread, just visible to the naked
eye, is the union of a thousand or more of these delicate streams of
silk. These primary threads are drawn out and united by the hind legs."
From this we see that two special glands, capable of secreting a soft
material that can be readily drawn into the finest threads of the
greatest strength, requiring no perceptible time for drying, and two to
four spinnerets perforated by more than a thousand of the smallest
apertures, and hind legs modified so that they can be used to draw out
the web through the spinnerets, and also the instincts which enable the
spider to use its web to advantage, must all have been evolved. To
evolve the silk glands would have required, as for most other organs, a
long period of incipiency, during which they would have been useless.
We can not assume that a substance so exceptional in its character as
the web of the spider could have been suddenly produced by evolution.
But the glands would be useless without spinnerets. The hypothesis asks
us to assume that two or three pairs of legs that were probably at one
time useful for locomotion became so modified that they could perform
the function of spinnerets. But in what conceivable way could
locomotive legs have become so modified and pierced with more than a
thousand apertures through which the web is drawn? And how could these
organs serve their purpose while the complex instincts required for
their functioning were only in course of development?

From a German monthly devoted to aquaria, we quote the following: "But
now, dear readers, we come to a fish which shows an exceptionally
peculiar and touching care for its young--the mouth-brooder,
_Haplochromis Strigigena_ (formerly _Paratilapia Multicolor_). This
fish is so much concerned about the safety of its young, that it knows
no better and no more secure place than its own mouth in which to
preserve them. In no other division of the animal kingdom can we find
such an interesting example of fostering care for the young as we find
in this species of fish. Immediately after emitting the spawn the female
again gathers up the eggs and packs them away in her mouth like herring
in a barrel. She naturally must employ the organs of the throat and also
the organs between the gills and thus the appearance of