There is love and courtship among spiders, as among birds and mammals, but with a unique—and fatal—difference. An observer thus describes a courtship scene in the _Cambridge Natural History_: “When some inches from her he stood still. She eyed him eagerly, changing her position from time to time. He, raising his whole body on the other side, leaned so far over he was in danger of losing his balance which he only maintained by sidling rapidly toward the lower side. Again and again he circled from side to side, she gazing toward him in a softer mode and evidently admiring the grace of his antics. This was repeated until we had counted 107 circles made by the ardent little male. He approached nearer and nearer and when almost within reach whirled madly around and around her. She joined him in the giddy dance. Again he fell back and resumed his semi-circular motion. She, all excitement, lowered her head and raised her body so that it was almost vertical. Both drew nearer. She moved slowly under him, he crawling over her head. Thus the mating was accomplished. “A few minutes later, however, the female had eaten her ardent lover.” _The Lace Weavers_ For 300,000,000 years tiny animals have been weaving delicate lace. They weave constantly, rapidly and in lovely, open mesh patterns. They make a stiff stable lace. Their own limestone entombed bodies are the threads. Night and day, millenium after millenium, they weave and weave, for the curse of weaving is forever upon them. Through time they have covered hundreds of square miles with white and green veils. For the most part these are fragile and short-lived, but in a few cases they have been preserved untorn through the ages. These lace weavers are the bryozoa, or moss animalcules—one of the oldest, most abundant and least known forms of animal life. They have much the same habits as the corals, but the two limestone secreting creatures are not even remotely related. The weavers are far higher in the scale of evolution than the island builders. Their family associations long have been in dispute. They have been associated with the rotifers and mollusks and even with some unknown ancestral form leading to the vertebrates. Now, however, it is believed that their nearest relatives are the nearly extinct brachiopods, or lampshells. The two groups started at about the same time in the Cambrian geological period of half a billion years ago, but they followed different paths of development. Both might be considered proto-mollusks—very remotely kin to clams and oysters. For milleniums the brachiopods flourished in the primaeval seas. During the Permean period, about 300,000,000 years ago, they constituted one of the most abundant forms of animal life. Now they seem close to the end of the road. The weavers are as flourishing, and busy, as ever.