SPIDERS
We wrote[C] something about the spider’s “struts and cantilevers,” and were gently chaffed by some friendly correspondents. Well, the spider is not only a marvellous engineer, he also seems a persistent patriot. There is one on our front lawn who still celebrates the Spanish-American war. Every morning, among the sun-sparkled shrubbery, we find he has erected a dewey arch.
[C] You can refer, if you insist, to a book called Plum Pudding.
One of the most exciting things we know is a series of dainty models at the Natural History Museum in New York, showing the various stages in a spider’s web. Did you know, for instance, that often a preliminary spiral is blocked in, to hold the web together during construction? This is afterward carefully removed to make room for the sticky spiral which does the fly-catching. So at any rate we remember the Museum’s models. If you find being stricken with astonishments a pleasing humiliation, the Museum is the place to visit. We always think to ourself, how old Sir Kenelm Digby would have enjoyed it.
Then, of course, you mustn’t omit to read Fabre’s glorious Life of the Spider. The microscopic Archimedes can much more than mere tenuous trusses and gossamer girders. M. Fabre tells us that the triumph of the spider’s unconscious art (for the creature works divinely, without reason or calculation) is the logarithmic spiral. So if by chance you have ever fallen into that meanest absurdity of the unthinking and asserted that “Mathematics is uninteresting,” consider Fabre’s words:—
Geometry, that is to say, the science of harmony in space, presides over everything. We find it in the arrangement of the scales of a fir-cone, as in the arrangement of an Epeira’s lime-snare; we find it in the spiral of a Snail-shell, in the chaplet of a Spider’s thread, as in the orbit of a planet; it is everywhere, as perfect in the world of atoms as in the world of immensities. And this universal geometry tells us of a Universal Geometrician, whose divine compass has measured all things.
The mathematician, let us add for our own part, is the greatest of poets, the greatest of priests.
But a study of M. Fabre’s magnificent books will not necessarily add consolations to the Pollyanna brand of religious thought. You will find, in his discussion of the appalling married life of insects, gruesome considerations which will furnish merriment to the cynic and painful grief to the old-fashioned. M. Maeterlinck says, in his eloquent preface to The Life of the Spider:
Nothing equals the marriage of the Green Grasshopper, of which I cannot speak here, for it is doubtful whether even the Latin language possesses the words needed to describe it as it should be described.
The fiercest realist yet produced by the younger generations of Chicago and Greenwich Village is a mere trifler compared to the immortal Fabre.
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