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Every one jumped on to the tables, women fainted and screamed, and the Frenchmen, for some unknown reason, all drew their revolvers. It turned out afterwards that the performing cobras had all had their poison-fangs drawn, and were consequently harmless. Its inhabitants declare that Ceylon is the most beautiful island in the world.
To draw the poison-fangs of faith in ourselves, we must subordinate it to the love of truth. The supreme worship of the true is the only means of purification for all religions all confessions, all sects. Faith should only be allowed the second place, for faith has a judge in truth.
If, by some accident, it become detached from the fastening to which it is hung, she flings herself madly on her treasure and lovingly embraces it, ready to bite whoso would take it from her. I myself am sometimes the thief. I then hear the points of the poison-fangs grinding against the steel of my pincers, which tug in one direction while the Lycosa tugs in the other.
All spiders, as far as known, are provided with poison-fangs in the jaws, which sometimes, as in the tarantula and many other large tropical kinds, well known to me in Jamaica and elsewhere, are sufficiently powerful to produce serious effects upon man himself; while even much smaller spiders, like Eliza and Lucy, have poison enough in their falces, as the jawlike organs are called, to kill a good big insect, such as a wasp or a bumble-bee.
Are they also unskilled duelists, plunging the dirk into the only easily accessible point, when their very first move is to paralyse the poison-fangs? If there is one point about the Tarantula and the Epeira that is dangerous and difficult to attack, it is certainly the mouth which bites with its two poisoned harpoons. And these desperadoes dare to brave that deadly trap!
All other means and methods of attack and defence have atrophied. They neither crush nor tear with their teeth nor constrict with their bodies. The poison-fangs are slender and delicate, and, save for the poison, the wound inflicted is of a trivial character. In consequence they are helpless in the presence of any animal which the poison does not affect.
The Calicurgus approaches her without the least sign of fear, walks round her and appears to have the intention of seizing one of her legs. But at that moment the Tarantula rises almost vertically on her four hinder legs, with her four front legs lifted and outspread, ready for the counterstroke. The poison-fangs gape widely; a drop of venom moistens their tips.
They had thus destroyed it as a specimen, and had broken three of the teeth, but I counted eight, and secured five poison-fangs, the two most prominent being nearly an inch in length. The poison-fangs of snakes are artfully contrived by some diabolical freak of nature as pointed tubes, through which the poison is injected into the base of the wound inflicted.
Against this attack, claws, teeth, poison-fangs would be idle weapons. In the van fled a cloud of terrified insects those gifted with flight to wing their way far off, while the humbler ones went running headlong, their legs, four, six, or a hundred, making the swiftest pace vouchsafed them.
The most powerful Spider in my district, the Black-bellied Tarantula, will presently give us something to think about, in this connection. It is not my business to discuss a medical point, I interest myself especially in matters of instinct; but, as the poison-fangs play a leading part in the huntress' manoeuvres of war, I shall speak of their effects by the way.