The method of most arachnids strangely resembles the medical practice called artificial fecundation, although it is hardly more so than normal fecundation. In both it is a question of putting spermatozoides in the way of encountering ovules: it matters little whether phallus or syringe be the vehicle. The spider uses a syringe. For a long time people thought that the whole genital apparatus was situated in the feelers of the male, but anatomy could find nothing there to resemble it. Savigny thought that the introduction of the feelers into the vulva was merely an excitative manœuvre, and that the true copulation followed. One had only observed half the act, the second phase. The first consists in the male's gathering up the semence in his own belly with the feelers; he then places it in the female organ. The maxillary peripalpe or antenna, thus transformed into a penis, contains a spiral canal which the male fills in placing it against the opening of his spermatic canals. One sees the joint of one of the knuckles open, letting appear a white bourrelet (pad with a hole in the middle), this is bent, and plunged into the vulva, it emerges and the insect flees. System marvellously adapted to the circumstances, for the female is ferocious and quite ready to devour her suitor. But is it the ferocity of the female which has modified the fecundating system, or is it the system, so lacking in tenderness, which has led the receptress to find only an enemy in the aspirant who advances horn to the fore? Acts which produce constant and useful results always seem to us ordered by an admirable logic; one need only give oneself up to a certain laziness of mind, to be led quite gently to call them providential and to fall little by little into the innocent nets of finalism. Doubtless--and undeniable--there is a general finality, but one must conceive it as represented entire by the present state of nature. This will not be a conception of order, but a conception of fact, and in any case, the means used to attain this fact should in no way be integrated in the finality itself. None of the procedures of generation, for example, bears the mark of necessity. It is not the ferocity of the she-spider which demands the sexual habit; the female mantis is still more savage, and mantis' method is cavalage. It does not seem as if anything in nature were ordered in view of some benefit; causes blindly engender causes; some maintain life, others force it to progress, others destroy it; we qualify them differently, according to the dictates of our sensibility, but they are non-qualifiable; they are movements, and nothing else. The pebble ricochets on the water, or it doesn't; this has no importance in itself, nothing more will come of it and nothing less. It is an image of supreme finality: after eight or ten bounds, life, like the pebble thrown by a child, will fall into the abyss, and with it all the good and evil, all facts, all ideas, and all things.