The spider world is the world of eight-legged creatures just as the insect world is the world of the six-legged ones, and educated men and women should no more confuse these great classes of beings than they confuse the bipeds with the quadrupeds.
They differ from the insects in other ways than in the number of their legs—they have no feelers or antennæ, those wonderful sense organs which all insects have, but here and there, especially on the legs, are strange hollow bristles or spines, which end in nerves. Their eyes also are not like insects’ eyes. An insect’s eyes, at least its large prominent ones, are composed of hundreds of lenses or facets, while the spider, though he generally boasts of eight, has only simple ones with single lenses.
Their life is very simple as compared with that of many of the insects. In the fall, the mother spiders lay their eggs in a bag of their own silk, often several hundred eggs being laid in one sac. The spiderlings hatch out in the sac, and, in the North, they spend the long winter there.
They do not have two stages of existence as beetles or butterflies do, but are hatched out mature and equipped with the poison fangs which aid them in their strictly carnivorous, and often even cannibalistic, existence.
They grow and shed their skins as do the baby grasshoppers, but they do not change their form with each moult and none of them have wings.
They have inside their bodies, reservoirs of strange, sticky fluids which they can pour out through spigots in many different ways. This fluid, as it dries, may form drag lines which they trail behind them and fasten as they go to use for safety lines; with some spiders it may even be poured out in such quantities that it makes an aeroplane; with the majority, however, it is used to make their nests or their egg sacs or the marvelously beautiful orbs that prove the graveyards of so many careless insects. For the spiders are the enemies of the insect world; were they more discriminating, they would be perhaps the greatest friends of the human race, but, as they suck all kinds of insects’ blood, all that we can be sure of is that those among them which we find in our houses are a benefit, for there they kill the flies and other insects which we do not want indoors.
To their Southern and especially their tropical cousins, which attack and sometimes kill human beings, this group of fascinating creatures owes the dread in which it is held by people in general. It is a pity, for throughout the Northern states, no dangerous species is known to exist, and those which frequent our houses will no more attack us than do the flies they catch and devour.
Until a child has gazed in wonder at an orb weaver as it spins its web between the trees, or been an eye-witness of the death of some insect unlucky enough to fall into a web, he has not taken his first step toward the wonderland which touches him on every side and he is in grave danger of growing up with a blind side—the side turned toward the field and forest.
There are millions upon millions of spiders, and thousands of species, and they live everywhere from the Arctic Regions to the Tropics. They devour countless myriads of flies and gnats and hosts of other insects, and nobody knows just what good they do us, but every entomologist would hold up his hands in fear at what the result might be should the spiders of the world be blotted out. They must hold countless parasites in check and help to keep the balance even.
If all the little children should learn that they are harmless, I wonder if they could not stop their nurses from killing them. It is the ignorance of those who train our little ones that keeps alive the unreasoning hatred towards so many of the wonder creatures of the woods.