The hinges are most exactly fitted, and the spider has an extraordinary power of closing his door from the inside, and resisting all intrusion. It is curious that as we _advance_ in the scale of creation these wonderful dwellings cease. Strange to say, the creature which roams at will through the forest, and has no settled resting-place, is higher in the scale of life—according to the recognised scheme of naturalists—than the animal that is mechanically capable of constructing the most perfect abode! Mr Wood reminds us that though the march of Science has destroyed much of our belief in the sweet old tales of fairyland, yet she has given us ample compensation, inasmuch as the ‘fairy tales of science’ are in reality more full of grace and poetry than any of the myths that delighted our childhood. And many of the forms which meet us, if we apply ourselves to the study of natural history, are more full of quaint or graceful fancy than the wildest tales that have ever stirred the imagination of an Eastern story-teller. What can be more beautiful than the little Velella, a sea-creature like a circular raft, with an upright membrane answering to a sail; ‘semi-transparent, and radiant in many rainbow-tinted colours.’ What more grotesque than the Archer-fish, ‘which possesses the curious power of feeding itself by shooting drops of water at flies, and very seldom fails to secure its prey;’ or the Angler-fish, which is endowed by Nature with a rod and bait ready adjusted. This remarkable creature has an enormous mouth; on the top of its head are certain prolonged cane-like filaments, beautifully set in a ring and staple joint, so as to turn every way; and at the end of these singular appendages is a little piece of flesh, which when waved about, looks like a living worm, and attracts the fish, which is then ingulfed in the huge jaws of this natural angler. Many interesting forms come to us from the water-world, suggestive of rafts, boats, oars, and anchors. An insect called the Water-boatman is itself both boat and oars, besides being its own passenger; the legs with which it rows are fashioned in most exact resemblance to the blade of an oar; or we should rather say that the blade of an oar resembles the leg of this Water-boatman. That fragile creature the Portuguese Man-of-war, which traverses the surface of the ocean like a bubble, and can at pleasure distend itself with air and float, or discharge the air and sink, shews us the principle of the life-dress in which Captain Boyton made his daring passage across the Channel. Cables too we have in plenty: the Pinna, a kind of mussel, anchors itself to some rock or stone with a number of silk-like threads spun by itself; and the Water-snail moors itself, perhaps to a water-lily leaf, by means of a gelatinous thread, slight, almost invisible, yet very strong, which it can elongate at pleasure.