lk; their tails broaden, their bodies
become many times longer. For a moment the illusion is perfect; thousands
of centuries have slipped back, and we are looking at the giant beavers of
old.

Let us give thanks that even the humble muskrat still holds his own. A
century or two hence and posterity may look with wonder at his stuffed
skin in a museum!

NATURE'S GEOMETRICIANS

Spiders form good subjects for a rainy-day study, and two hours spent in a
neglected garret watching these clever little beings will often arouse
such interest that we shall be glad to devote many days of sunshine to
observing those species which hunt and build, and live their lives in the
open fields. There is no insect in the world with more than six legs, and
as a spider has eight he is therefore thrown out of the company of
butterflies, beetles, and wasps and finds himself in a strange assemblage.
Even to his nearest relatives he bears little resemblance, for when we
realise that scorpions and horseshoe crabs must call him cousin, we
perceive that his is indeed an aberrant bough on the tree of creation.

Leaving behind the old-fashioned horseshoe crabs to feel their way slowly
over the bottom of the sea, the spiders have won for themselves on land a
place high above the mites, ticks, and daddy-long-legs, and in their high
development and intricate powers of resource they yield not even to the
ants and bees.

Nature has provided spiders with an organ filled always with liquid which,
on being exposed to the air, hardens, and can be drawn out into the
slender threads we know as cobweb. The silkworm encases its body with a
mile or more of gleaming silk, but there its usefulness is ended as far as
the silkworm is concerned. But spiders have found a hundred uses for their
cordage, some of which are startlingly similar to human inventions.

Those spiders which burrow in the earth hang their tunnels with silken
tapestries impervious to wet, which at the same time act as lining to the
tube. Then the entrance may be a trap-door of soil and silk, hinged with
strong silken threads; or in the turret spiders which are found in our
fields there is reared a tiny tower of leaves or twigs bound together with
silk. Who of us has not teased the inmate by pushing a bent straw into his
stronghold and awaiting his furious onslaught upon the innocent stalk!

A list of all the uses of cobwebs would take more space than we can spare;
but of these the most