phenomena of maternal love. One of the first articles published by a
naturalist on these phenomena, _La Psychologie d'une Araignee_ (The
Psychology of a Spider) might serve as the motive of a drama. The
spider, as is well known, makes a bag of threads, which she generally
attaches to the backs of leaves, and in it she deposits and preserves
her eggs; she gets into it herself together with the eggs, to protect
the treasure of the species. If the bag should be broken at any point,
the spider promptly repairs it. By way of experiment, a spider was
taken out of the bag, and kept at a distance for twenty days. What is
a spider? A few cubic millimetres of a dark, flabby substance without
brain or heart, whose life is so short that twenty days constitute a
very long interval for it; but this small creature never relaxed her
efforts to escape, and her agitation never abated; finally, when she
was liberated at the end of the twenty days, she fled to the bag, hid
herself in it, and repaired the walls. Where was all this love and
memory concentrated? This mother-spider was then removed from the
nest, and another spider was introduced, which at once adopted the
offspring, acted the mother, defended the nest from attack, and
repaired the walls if they were damaged. There must therefore be a
maternal instinct in the species, independent of actual maternity. But
when the real mother approached the adopted bag, not only did the
foster-mother make no attempt to defend it, but she fled and gave up
her place. By what phenomenon of telepathy did the visitor concealed
in the bag feel the maternal power approaching? The following was the
end of the experiment: the little spiders were hatched, and remained
in the bag together with their mother; the experimenter tore the bag
to see what would happen; the little spiders fled in every direction,
but the mother remained crouching on the tattered fragments of the
nest, and died, almost violently, killed by the destruction of her
offspring. Maternal love, therefore, does not require complicated
organs; it needs neither brain, heart, nor senses, and seems almost to
exist without matter; it is the force which life assumes to protect
and preserve itself, a force which seems to exist before and to
accompany creation, like that wisdom of which Solomon speaks: "The
Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of
old.... When there were no depths, I was brought forth.... Then I was
by h