FOR the past three summers there has been along the new Charles River Basin water-front, an increasing plague of spiders, whose webs disfigure the iron railings of the esplanade, and who even make their way into the basement of neighboring houses, to the dismay of tidy housekeepers. These spiders, who presumably frequent the water-side in order to prey on mosquitoes and other insects which breed there, are abominable creatures.
"Most foul, as in the best they are,
But these most foul, strange, and unnatural.”
They are not even plump, bloated, and comfortably vicious, like most spiders, but misshapen starvelings, scrawny, loathesome and altogether detestable.
By all tokens the spider should be a creature deserving great respect. Biologically she is supposed to represent the link by which the line of human evolution diverged from the insects. Morphologically, indeed, the spider and her congeners exemplify important structural advances over precedent forms of life. Ethically, as an example of industry, the spider in popular apologue has been coupled with the scriptural ant; and in the history of Robert Bruce, at least, has by her patient cunning not only conveyed an important moral lesson but thereby changed the fate of nations. Mythologically, however, in her origin is revealed the spider’s essentially detestable nature, for it was into a spider, the most odious of conceivable forms, that Athena transmuted the Lydian maid whose pride in her weaving had provoked the resentment and hatred of the goddess of wisdom.
“Fitque caput minimum, toto quoque corpore
parva est;
In latere exiles digiti pro cruribus haerent,
Cetera venter habet: de quo tamen illa remittit
Stamen, et antiquas exercet aranea telas.”
In point of fact, the spider is one of the most cunning artizans of all the “long-legged spinners,” and the fineness of her web makes it still of use in certain optical instruments, where it proves more delicate than any that can be woven by human skill. Collectively cobwebs have been used in medicine to check hemorrhage, and the spider herself, in medieval therapeutics, was supposed to possess great medicinal virtue. Spiders were prescribed to be eaten and as local applications, and were used as ingredients of many of the unutterable decoctions of necromantic polypharmacy. In anatomy, too, the spider has given her name to that elusive middle layer of the meninges, which dissectors always earnestly seek, but never observe. Yet exquisite though it be in point of workmanship, or when spread as gossamer on the grass of a dewy morning, the spider’s web about human habitations speaks always of decay, negligence, untidiness and unthrift.
Many famous persons have been spider lovers and have collected, studied, protected and observed them. Kant and Mozart have been among these; yet, great as they were, it seems that there must have been something abnormal in their temperament which could find pleasant companionship in such creatures. Still more might be said of the perversion of spider-eaters, of whom several are recorded in ancient medical history who persisted for months in an exclusive diet of spiders. From our essentially arachnophobic editorial point of view such a course could be indicative only of hopeless mental alienation of advanced grade.
The spider is one of nature’s scavengers and serves a necessary and desirable purpose among the checks and balances of animate existence. But in herself she is utterly loathesome and hideous, infinitely more so indeed than the lithe, beautiful, and elegant serpent, whom mankind is supposed to detest with perfect hatred. Shakespeare, like all artists, hated spiders, and it is significant that his most frequent mention of them is in Richard III, who is repeatedly compared in his malignity to a “bottled spider.” And in Cymbeline Guiderins says to Clotenz:---
“Cloten, thou double villain, be thy name, I cannot tremble at it; were it Spider ’Twould move me sooner.”
The spider is the archetype of malevolent, venomous evil. The only plague which was not sent upon the land of Pharaoh was a plague of spiders: that would have been too much for even the Egyptians to tolerate with equanimity.
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