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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