Spinoza, in his strenuous devotion to scientific truth, knowing nothing about the tiny rod-shaped bacillus that was growing in his lungs, led a most unhealthy life. Sometimes for three months together his footsteps would not cross the lintel; he lived a life of asceticism worthy of Nietzsche himself, or of a monk of the Thebaid, though for a very different reason. Eating just enough to keep him alive and no more, cheerful and merry with his friends, averse from all political and religious contention, he was proud of only one thing—his self-control. People said that he used to be vastly amused by setting two spiders to fight one another. Of course this story really represents Spinoza’s interest in the weird marriage rights of the Arachnidæ. These are really extraordinarily interesting, and many a thoughtful man has followed them, with the aid of an electric torch, in the dusk of the evening when the sexes conjoin. The female is considerably larger and more powerful than the male; and she sits quietly waiting with a naughty gleam in her bright eyes, at the centre of the web. He, insignificant despicable wretch, dances timidly towards her, two of his paws held out with the caution of a professional pugilist. They meet, he continuing his excessive caution. Then a moment of love, an almost imperceptible caress, and he flees literally for his life with hell at his heels. Should the dutiful wife catch him, woe worth the day for the husband. The wicked creature, having sated her sinful lust, devours him, claw, spinnerets and all. Marriage from the point of view of a spider must be an exciting business. I do not know what are the odds on the escape of the male; but doubtless Spinoza worked them out from his own observations. Personally I should fancy that the male has about an even chance. I have often watched among the mosquitoes only to find after an hour that the male could not approach at all, dare he never so wisely. But I have seen horrid orgies of cannibalism should the husband be a shade too slow. It is feminism _in excelsis_; she, great, big, hulking brute that she is, cannibalistically eats her dear little mate with his slender and spiderly grace. And likes to do it, too. Fabre thought that it was a sort of religious rite among the Arachnidæ; but let us think better of the race of spiders than that. I have no doubt whatever that it was while Spinoza was watching the spiders at their cannibalistic love-making that the amazing spectacle of the presence of so much cruelty in Nature thrust itself before his mind, and led him to speculate why he, too, a man so good and virtuous, who had never harmed a single living creature in his life, should yet be so ill and coughing and sweating and spitting and falling away to a shadow. It was then probably that he evolved his stately system of pantheism that has so impressed the scientific world. Why should the performance of a purely natural function, one which God has implanted in the spiders