Is it not probable that we cling so dearly to the idea of our own existence as individuals that we forget we are only halves of a whole, and that the whole itself is only a fraction of that vague living something spread out over the earth, moving in millions of places at once which we call a living species? When we shall have shifted our sympathies and made them cover a thousand generations of beings, we shall have risen to the point of view that a divinity must take. The enigmas of existence, I venture to say, will only be understood from this standpoint and not from the more sympathetic one of regret over the shortness, cruelty or barrenness of any individual's life. The male spider seems peculiarly to be just a tool in the machinery of descent, merely a carrier of the male germ cells which, whenever, and not before, they come in contact with their female counterparts, start into activity the marvelous growth which results in new individuals similar to itself. These male cells which form within its body, mature, and are ejected as living, ciliated things into a web of special make; and two special syringes formed late in life at the tips of the leg-like palpi draw them up and hold them stored until it is time for them to be injected during the mating process into special sacs within the female, where they fuse in some strange way with female cells and start the following generation. His palpi once emptied of these male cells, of what further use to the species can he be and why should not the carnivorous female promptly eat him up? [Illustration] THE DADDY-LONG-LEGS OR HARVESTMAN (_Leiobunum grande_, Weed) Who has not watched daddy-long-legs stalk majestically across the floor or up the wall, one long slender leg waving in front of him like the arm of some gesticulating prophet of old? Indeed, the fly or mosquito is hardly more familiar. Long-leggedness is all relative to size of body, and viewed from this standpoint everyone must agree that the harvestman is the longest-legged creature in the world. If its body were the size of a flamingo its legs would cover over thirty feet of ground. As it has eight legs and each leg is eight times the length of its body it has sixty-four times as much length of leg as of body. It is a strange, spider creature having only two eyes which look to right and left from a turret-like hump in the middle of its back. Its claws in front have pincers like a crab's. Opposite the first pair of legs are scent glands from which it pours out a fluid which has so bad an odor that it seems to protect it from its foes. Swung low between its legs, this creature of twilight and shade wanders in search of small insects which it catches and devours as other spiders do. It only lives one season in the North and spins no web and makes no nest. The female lays her eggs deep down in the ground or under stones or in the crevices of the bark of trees. CHAPTER II THE INSECT WORLD STRAIGHT-WINGED INSECTS