fully
concealed than the old one had been. The builder had so completely
covered it with small dry twigs about the size of an ordinary pin, and
had so woven these into it, standing a few of them on end, that my eye
was baffled. I knew to an inch where to look for the door, and yet it
seemed to have vanished. By feeling the ground over with a small stick I
found a yielding place which proved to be the new unfinished door. Day
after day the door grew heavier and stronger. The builder worked at it
on the under side, adding new layers of silk. There is always a layer of
the soil worked into the door to give it weight and strength.

Spiders, like reptiles, can go months without food. The young, according
to Fabre, go seven months without eating. They do not grow, but they are
very active; they expend energy without any apparent means of keeping up
the supply. How do they do it? They absorb it directly from the sun,
Fabre thinks, which means that here is an animal between which and the
organic world the vegetable chlorophyl plays no part, but which can take
at first-hand, from the sun, the energy of life. If this is true, and it
seems to be so, it is most extraordinary.

In view of the sex of the extraordinary spider I have been considering,
it is interesting to remember that one difference between the insect
world and the world of animal life to which we belong, which Maeterlinck
has forgotten to point out, is this:

In the vertebrate world, the male rules; the female plays a secondary
part. In the insect world the reverse is true. Here the female is
supreme and often eats up the male after she has been fertilized by him.
Motherhood is the primary fact, fatherhood the secondary. It is the
female mosquito that torments the world. It is the female spider that
spins the web and traps the flies. Size, craft, and power go with the
female. The female spider eats up the male after he has served her
purpose; her caresses mean death. The female scorpion devours the male
in the same way. Among our wild bees it is the queen alone that survives
the winter and carries on the race. The big noisy blow-flies on the
window-pane are females. With the honey bees the males are big and loud,
but are without any authority, and are almost as literally destroyed by
the female as is the male spider. The queen bee does not eat her mate,
but she disembowels him. The work of the hive is done by the neuters. In
the vertebrate world it is chiefly among