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Updated: May 9, 2025
The cell formation of the bee, the house- building of ants and beavers, the web-spinning of spiders, are but primitive exercises of constructiveness, the faculty which, indefinite with us, leads to the arts of the weaver, upholsterer, architect, and mechanist, and makes us often work delightedly where our labours are in vain, or nearly so.
The web-spinning species were also more numerous than I had ever seen them, and were a great annoyance, stretching their nets across the footpaths just about the height of my face; and the threads composing these are so strong and glutinous as to require much trouble to free oneself from them.
To be conversant with the abstractions which, in the hands of some metaphysical giants, have rendered both mind and matter like abstractions, is a course of proceeding I should scarcely indorse; and the best antidote I remember just now to any such web-spinning proclivities is a persual of the three first lectures of Sidney Smith on 'Moral Philosophy. In recapitulating the tenets of the schools, he says: 'The speculations of many of the ancients on the human understanding are so confused, and so purely hypothetical, that their greatest admirers are not agreed upon their meaning; and whenever we can procure a plain statement of their doctrines, all other modes of refuting them appear to be wholly superfluous. Miss Beulah, I especially commend you to these humorous lectures."
Its pale red colour barred with velvet black first drew my attention to it, for it was beautiful to the eye; and presently I discovered that this was no web-spinning, sedentary spider, but a wandering hunter, that captured its prey, like a cat, by stealing on it concealed and making a rush or spring at the last.
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