ruit. Up the
scaling bark of the trunks the brown tree-climbers run, peering into
every cranny, and few are the insects which escape those keen eyes.
Sitting on a bench under a pear-tree, I saw a spider drop from a
leaf fully nine feet above the ground, and disappear in the grass,
leaving a slender rope of web, attached at the upper end to a leaf,
and at the lower to a fallen pear. In a few minutes a small white
caterpillar, barely an inch long, began to climb this rope. It
grasped the thread in the mouth and drew up its body about a
sixteenth of an inch at a time, then held tight with the two
fore-feet, and, lifting its head, seized the rope a sixteenth
higher; repeating this operation incessantly, the rest of the body
swinging in the air. Never pausing, without haste and without rest,
this creature patiently worked its way upwards, as a man might up a
rope. Let anyone seize a beam overhead and attempt to lift the chest
up to a level with it, the expenditure of strength is very great;
even with long practice, to 'swarm' up a pole or rope to any
distance is the hardest labour the human muscles are capable of.
This despised 'creeping thing,' without the slightest apparent
effort, without once pausing to take breath, reached the leaf
overhead in rather under half an hour, having climbed a rope fully
108 times its own length. To equal this a man must climb 648 feet,
or more than half as high again as St. Paul's. The insect on
reaching the top at once commenced feeding, and easily bit through
the hard pear-leaf: how delicately then it must have grasped the
slender spider's web, which a touch would destroy! The thoughts
which this feat call forth do not end here, for there was no
necessity to go up the thread; the insect could to all appearance
have travelled up the trunk of the tree with ease, and it is not to
be supposed that its mouth and feet were specially adapted to climb
a web, a thing which I have never seen done since, and which was to
all appearance merely the result of the _accident_ of the insect
coming along just after the spider had left the thread. Another few
minutes, and the first puff of wind would have carried the thread
away--as a puff actually did soon afterwards. I claim a wonderful
amount of _original_ intelligence--as opposed to the ill-used term
instinct--of patience and perseverance for this creature. It is so
easy to imagine that because man is big, brain power cannot exist in
tiny organizations;