LET me put a spider into any lady’s hand – she is aghast; she shrieks, “The nasty, ugly thing!” Madam, the spider is perhaps shocked at your Brussels lace, and, although you may be the most exquisite painter living, the spider has a right to laugh at your coarse daubs as she runs over them. Just show her your crochet-work when you shriek at her. “Have you spent half you days upon these clumsy anti-macassars* and these ottoman covers? My dear lady, is that your web? If I were big enough, I might with reason drop you, and cry out at you. Let me spend a day with you, and bring my work. I have four little bags of thread – such little bags! In every bag there are more than one thousand holes – such tiny, tine holes! Out of each hole a thread runs, and all the threads – more than four thousand threads – I spin together as they run, and when they are all spun they make but one thread of the web I weave. I have a member of my family who is herself no bigger than a grain of sand. Imagine that a slender web she makes! and of that, too, each thread is made of four or five thousand threads that have passed out of her four bags, through four or five thousand little holes. Would you drop her, too, crying out about your delicacy? A pretty thing, indeed, for you to plume yourself on your delicacy, and scream at us.” Having made such a speech, we may suppose that the indignant creature fastens a rope round one of the rough points of the lady’s hand, and lets herself down lightly to the floor. Coming down stairs is noisy, clumsy work, compared with such a way of locomotion. The creeping things we scorn are miracles of beauty. They are more delicate than any ormolu clock or any lady’s watch made, for pleasure’s sake, no bigger than a shilling. Lyonnet** counted four thousand and forty-one muscles in a single caterpillar, and these are a small part only of its powers. Hook found fourteen thousand mirrors in the eyes of a bluebottle, and there are thirteen thousand three hundred separate pieces that go to provide nothing but the act of breathing in a carp. How wondrous is the power of the Great Creator, which has organized such a perfect system of being!