The Life of the Spider. Jean-Henri Casimir Fabre

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СКАЧАТЬ the little that I saw, it appears to me that the bite of this Spider is not an accident which man can afford to treat lightly. This is all that I have to say to the doctors.

      To the philosophical entomologists I have something else to say: I have to call their attention to the consummate knowledge of ​the insect-killers, which vies with that of the paralyzers. I speak of insect-killers in the plural, for the Tarantula must share her deadly art with a host of other Spiders, especially with those who hunt without nets. These insect-killers, who live on their prey, strike the game dead instantaneously by stinging the nerve-centres of the neck; the paralyzers, on the other hand, who wish to keep the food fresh for their larvae, destroy the power of movement by stinging the game in the other nerve-centres. Both of them attack the nervous chain, but they select the point according to the object to be attained. If death be desired, sudden death, free from danger to the huntress, the insect is attacked in the neck; if mere paralysis be required, the neck is respected and the lower segments—sometimes one alone, sometimes three, sometimes all or nearly all, according to the special organization of the victim—receive the dagger-thrust.

      Even the paralyzers, at least some of them, are acquainted with the immense vital importance of the nerve-centres of the neck. We have seen the Hairy Ammophila munching the caterpillar's brain, the Languedocian ​Sphex munching the brain of the Ephippigera, with the object of inducing a passing torpor. But they simply squeeze the brain, and do even this with a wise discretion; they are careful not to drive their sting into this fundamental centre of life; not one of them ever thinks of doing so, for the result would be a corpse which the larva would despise. The Spider, on the other hand, inserts her double dirk there and there alone; any elsewhere it would inflict a wound likely to increase resistance through irritation. She wants a venison for consumption without delay and brutally thrusts her fangs into the spot which the others so conscientiously respect.

      If the instinct of these scientific murderers is not, in both cases, an inborn predisposition, inseparable from the animal, but an acquired habit, then I rack my brain in vain to understand how that habit can have been acquired. Shroud these facts in theoretic mists as much as you will, you shall never succeed in veiling the glaring evidence which they afford of a pre-established order of things.

      1 ↑ A small or moderate-sized Spider found among foliage.—Translator's Note.

      2 ↑ Léon Dufour (1780-1865) was an army surgeon who served with distinction in several campaigns and subsequently practised as a doctor in the Landes. He attained great eminence as a naturalist.—Translator's Note.

      3 ↑ The Tarantula is a Lycosa, or Wolf-spider. Fabre's Tarantula, the Black-bellied Tarantula, is identical with the Narbonne Lycosa, under which name the description is continued in Chapters III to VI, all of which were written at a considerably later date than the present chapter.—Translator's Note.

      4 ↑ Giorgio Baglivi (1669-1707), professor of anatomy and medicine at Rome.—Translator's Note.

      5 ↑ "When our husbandmen wish to catch them, they approach their hiding-places, and play on a thin grass pipe, making a sound not unlike the humming of bees. Hearing which, the Tarantula rushes out fiercely that she may catch the flies or other insects of this kind, whose buzzing she thinks it to be; but she herself is caught by her rustic trapper."

      6 ↑ Provençal for the bit of waste ground on which the author studies his insects in the natural state.—Translator's Note.

      7 ↑ 'Thanks to the Bumble-bee.'

      8 ↑ Like the Dung-beetles.—Translator's Note.

      9 ↑ Like the Solitary Wasps.—Translator's Note.

      10 ↑ Such as the Hairy Ammophila, the Cerceris and the Languedocian Sphex. Digger-wasps described in other of the author's essays.—Translator's Note.

      11 ↑ The desnucador, the Argentine slaughterman, whose methods of slaying cattle are detailed in the author's essay entitled, The Theory of Instinct.—Translator's Note.

      12 ↑ A family of Grasshoppers.—Translator's Note.

      13 ↑ A genus of Beetles.—Translator's Note.

      14 ↑ A species of Digger-wasp.—Translator's Note.

      15 ↑ The Cicada is the Cigale, an insect akin to the Grasshopper and found more particularly in the South of France.—Translator's Note.

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