The Life of the Spider. Jean-Henri Casimir Fabre
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Название: The Life of the Spider
Автор: Jean-Henri Casimir Fabre
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Математика
isbn: 4064066463205
isbn:
Evidently, this is hoping too little. In the frightful pit, in the bottomless funnel wherein whirl all those contradictory facts which are resolved in obscurity, we know just as much as our cave-dwelling ancestors; but at least we know that we do not know. We survey the dark faces of all the riddles, we try to estimate their number, to classify their varying degrees of dimness, to obtain an idea of their places and extent. That already is something, pending the day of the first gleams of light. In any case, it means doing, in the presence of the mysteries, all that the most upright intelligence can do to-day; and that is what the author of this incomparable Iliad does, with more confidence than he professes. He gazes at them attentively. He wears out his life in surprising their most minute secrets. He prepares for them, in his thoughts and in ours, the field necessary for their evolutions. He increases the consciousness of his ignorance in proportion to their importance and learns to understand more and more that they are incomprehensible.
Maurice Maeterlinick.
1 ↑ Maillane is the birthplace of Mistral, the Provençal poet.—Translator's Note.
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
The following essays have been selected from the ten volumes composing the Souvenirs entomologiques. Although a good deal of Henri Fabre's masterpiece has been published in English, none of the articles treating of spiders has been issued before, with the exception of that forming Chapter II of the present volume, The Banded Epeira, which first appeared in The English Review. The rest are new to England and America.
The Fabre books already published are Insect Life, translated by the author of Mademoiselle Mori (Macmillan Co., 1901); The Life and Love of the Insect, translated by myself (Macmillan Co., 1911); and Social Life in the Insect World, translated by Mr. Bernard Miall (Century Co., 1912). References to the above volumes will be found, whenever necessary, in the foot-notes to the present edition.
For the rest, I have tried not to overburden my version with notes; and, in view of this, I have, as far as possible, simplified the scientific terms that occur in the text. In so doing I know that I have but followed the wishes of the author, who never wearies of protesting against 'the barbarous terminology' favoured by his brother-naturalists. The matter became even more urgent in English than in any of the Latin languages; and I readily agreed when it was pointed out to me that, in a work essentially intended for general reading, there was no purpose in speaking of a Coleopteron when the word 'beetle' was to hand. In cases where an insect had inevitably to be mentioned by its Greek or Latin name, a note is given explaining, in the fewest words, the nature of the insect in question.
I have to thank my friend, M. Maurice Maeterlinck, for the stately preface which he has contributed to this volume, and Mr. Marmaduke Langdale and Miss Frances Rodwell for the generous assistance which they have given me in the details of my work. And I am also greatly indebted to Mr. W. S. Graff Baker for his invaluable help with the mathematical difficulties that confronted me in the translation of the Appendix.
Alexander Teixeira de Mattos.
Chelsea, 10 October, 1912.
The Black-Bellied Tarantula
CHAPTER I
THE BLACK-BELLIED TARANTULA
THE Spider has a bad name: to most of us, she represents an odious, noxious animal, which every one hastens to crush under foot. Against this summary verdict the observer sets the beast's industry, its talent as a weaver, its wiliness in the chase, its tragic nuptials and other characteristics of great interest. Yes, the Spider is well worth studying, apart from any scientific reasons; but she is said to be poisonous, and that is her crime and the primary cause of the repugnance wherewith she inspires us. Poisonous, I agree, if by that we understand that the animal is armed with two fangs which cause the immediate death of the little victims which it catches; but there is a wide difference between killing a Midge and harming a man. However immediate in its effects upon the insect entangled in the fatal web, the Spider's poison is not serious for us and causes less inconvenience than a Gnat-bite. That, at least, is what we can safely say as regards the great majority of the Spiders of our regions.
Nevertheless, a few are to be feared; and foremost among these is the Malmignatte, the terror of the Corsican peasantry. I have seen her settle in the furrows, lay out her web and rush boldly at insects larger than herself; I have admired her garb of black velvet speckled with carmine-red; above all, I have heard most disquieting stories told about her. Around Ajaccio and Bonifacio, her bite is reputed very dangerous, sometimes mortal. The countryman declares this for a fact and the doctor does not always dare deny it. In the neighbourhood of Pujaud, nor far from Avignon, the harvesters speak with dread of Theridion lugubre,[1] first observed by Léon Dufour in the Catalonian mountains; according to them, her bite would lead to serious accidents. The Italians have bestowed a bad reputation on the Tarantula, who produces convulsions and frenzied dances in the person stung by her. To cope with 'tarantism,' the name given to the disease that follows on the bite of the Italian Spider, you must have recourse to music, the only efficacious remedy, so they tell us. Special tunes have been noted, those quickest to afford relief. There is medical choreography, medical music. And have we not the tarantella, a lively and nimble dance, bequeathed to us perhaps by the healing art of the Calabrian peasant?
Must we take these queer things seriously or laugh at them? From the little that I have seen, I hesitate to pronounce an opinion. Nothing tells us that the bite of the Tarantula may not provoke, in weak and very impressionable people, a nervous disorder which music will relieve; nothing tells us that a profuse perspiration, resulting from a very energetic dance, is not likely to diminish the discomfort by diminishing the cause of the ailment. So far from laughing, I reflect and enquire, when the Calabrian peasant talks to me of his Tarantula, the Pujaud reaper of his Theridion lugubre, the Corsican husbandman of his Malmignatte. Those Spiders might easily deserve, at least partly, their terrible reputation.
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's manœuvres of war, I shall speak of their effects by the way. The habits of the Tarantula, her ambushes, her artifices, her methods of killing her prey: these constitute my subject. I will preface it with an account by Léon Dufour,[2] one of those accounts in which I used to delight and which did much to bring me into closer touch with the insect. The Wizard of the Landes tells us of the ordinary Tarantula, that of the Calabrias, observed by him in Spain:
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