Its cunning and craft have passed into a proverb; and all the children know that its apparent treachery, in decoying the little fly into its parlour, has been suitably expressed in verse. Its fierceness also is quite equal to its cunning, and when the thought of its hairy-looking appearance is added to the fact of the poison-fangs which it buries in the bodies of its victims, there would seem to be enough to warrant the general dislike with which the spider has at all times been regarded. On the other hand, we must not forget these two things—(1) That the spider is only fulfilling the instinct which an all-wise God has implanted in it; and (2) that it is of great service to man in diminishing the swarms of insects by which he is molested. Thomas Edward, the Banffshire naturalist, calculated that a single pair of swallows would destroy 282,000 insects in one year while rearing their two broods, and sometimes they rear three. And if this be the service rendered by a single pair of birds, what may not be accomplished by those innumerable spiders that weave their gummy webs on every bush and hedge-row, and spend the entire day, and sometimes the whole night, in trapping and ridding the atmosphere of those annoying pests. Bereft of these wily hunters, we should be like the Egyptians in the time of Moses—plagued and eaten up of flies: so that in spite of prejudice and general dislike the spider is occupying a real sphere of usefulness in the world. And so may we. We can afford at times to pause and study the hunter’s skill, and do something to imitate its prowess. III.—ITS FAME AS A TEACHER. It teaches us how to spin and how to weave, how to hunt and how to snare. And as one has expressed it, it has solved many a problem in mathematics before Euclid was born. Look at the spider’s web, and see whether "any hand of man, with all the fine appliances of art, and twenty years’ apprenticeship to boot, could weave us such another." Nay, if we think of the _water_-spider, which bottles up air, and takes it under water to breathe with, it is not too much to say, that if people had but "watched water-spiders as Robert Bruce watched the cottage spider, diving-bells would have been discovered hundreds of years ago, and people might have learnt how to go to the bottom of the sea and save the treasures of wrecks." The name of King Robert the Bruce suggests one special lesson. If all history be true, the spider will always be known in Scotland as the teacher of _perseverance_— "If at first you don’t succeed, Try, try, try again."