ANIMAL ARTS AND CRAFTS.*
Tan industry and patient ingenuity of insects must be a never-ceasing source of wonder to all thoughtful people, and we should be more grateful than we are to those painstaking observers who chronicle the small but highly interesting "beer" of the spider and the ant, The spider alone would furnish detail enough to fill a volume as large as that now before us, and the pages devoted to it by the authors afford the happiest examples of their style and the most fascinating reading, perhaps, in the book. Moreover, the spider we know best of all is facile princeps in his order. He constructs what we must admit to be an artistically and mechanically perfect specimen of engineering in forty minutes, and pro- vides it with something like a hundred thousand drops of " fly- lime " as welL His choice of supports often seems to us original. We recollect a web that had for its three supports the latch of a checket-window, a wash-basin on the sill below, and the back of a chair. In these fortunate isles we have no formidable spiders. What would Miss Muffet have said to the spider of the Brazils which pursues people, and of which Bates relates that when he cut at it with his whip it ran up the thong and only just gave him time to throw it away ? Another spider, when apprehensive of danger, drops to the end of a thread, and revolves with such inconceivable rapidity that it becomes invisible. Many peculiarities in animal architecture are unexplained, and one or two instances occur in the habits of the mole. Few people are aware that the little gentleman in brown velvet is not only intensely energetic, but an architect of fortresses and nests. He and his mate line their nests with oak and beech leaves, and while the nest is changed every year, the same fortress is inhabited for several years. The two are very indirectly connected. One of the peculiarities we alluded to is the presence of a shaft below the nest, which some suggest is for the purpose of providing drinking-water, others as a larder for keeping paralysed worms in ; the authors think it to be only a badly planned bolt-run. We cannot believe that of so intelligent an animal as the mole. May it not be used as a punishment chamber, to threaten baby moles with, by suspending them over a bottomless abyss ? The other re- markable peculiarity is this, that while the male drives straight tunnels, the female digs the most tortuous passages. The life history of the mole as here related is an example of how much we have to learn.
Birds' nests all of us know and admire, though the most remarkable specimens of the weaving and plastering arts are found in other climes. The most valuable nests of the edible swift are made entirely of saliva; mason bees and potter wasps make their various structures with the aid of saliva and sand, chalk, or grit; and paper-making insects manufacture an excellent waterproof material out of wood-chips and the same secretion. We do not associate shrimps with nests, but one species makes a nest of seaweed bound together with ropes of cement. It takes half-an-hour to make a complete tubular nest. The difference between styles of architecture is not more remarkable than the slowness of some building operations and the rapidity of others, and the many examples of bird and insect structure related in this charming book furnish food for much thought. The comparative speed of these wonderful artisans bears no relation to their size, except that one might lay down the formula that their mechanical rapidity is as the square root of their size. The martin takes a week to finish a nest, the shrimp half-an-hour, and the real reason is that the building materials are produced as fast as the shrimp can arrange them. We can imagine no more truly instructive study for an intelligent boy than these and sundry comparisons which he will evolve for himself. What dis- coveries may he not make, surprising, for instance, the raft spider, the pirate of the fens as we may call him, floating down some slow stream, or those larvae who make their
* The Romance of Animal Arts and Crafts. By H. Coupin and J. Lea, London: Seeley and Co. [58.3
caves out of living water-snails P The description of these wonders is in every way worthy of the subject, being clear and luminous, and maintaining throughout a high level of interest.
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