The threads of the nest to receive the young,
are like cotton; those of the cocoon, to protect
the eggs, have the resistance necessary
to insure their safety.

Everything that lives feeds on prey.
Nature herself devours herself; but the prey
is not always earned and merited by patient
industry which deserves to be respected.
Nevertheless, no creature is more the sport
of fortune than the spider. As is the case
with every good operative, fortune has a
double hold upon her—on her work and on
her person. A swarm of insects, the
murderous carabus, the elegant and magnificent
assassin the dragon-fly, are furnished with
their weapons, and pass their lives joyously
in butchery. Others have safe retreats, easy
to defend, where they make light of danger.
The field spider has neither the one
advantage nor the other. She is like a small
tradesman whose trifling capital and limited
custom attract and tempt cupidity or
insult. The lizard from below, the squirrel
from above, give chace to the feeble huntress.
The lazy toad fixes and gums her helpless at
the tip of his protruding, viscous tongue.
The swallow, and every other bird, considers
her as a delicious tit-bit and an excellent
medicine. Even the very nightingale, who,
like other great singers, sticks to a certain
regimen, every now and then prescribes
himself a spider, by way of an agreeable
purgative.

But supposing that she escapes being
gobbled up herself, if the instrument of her
trade is destroyed, she is in an equally
miserable plight. If her web is broken bit
by bit, a prolonged fast will deprive her of
the power of spinning thread, and she soon
dies of hunger. She can never escape out of
a vicious circle; to spin, she must eat, and
to eat, she must spin. Her thread is the
thread of the Fates, of her destiny. When
people talk about the spider's gluttonous
greediness, they forget that she is obliged
to eat double, or die; she must eat to
restore her person, and must eat to repair
her web.

Three things contribute to wear her out;
the ardour of her incessant toil, her nervous
susceptibility, which is developed to an
extreme degree, and lastly her double system
of respiration. For she has not only the
passive respiration of the insect, which is
subjected to the action of the air entering its
stigmata or spiracles; she has besides a sort
of active respiration analogous to the play of
the lungs in the superior animals. She takes
in the air, holds it, transforms and decomposes
it, and by its means incessantly renovates
her framee. Only to observe her movements,
you feel that she is something more
than an insect; her vital flux must rush in a
rapid circulation, her heart must beat very
differently to that of a bluebottle or a
butterfly. A superiority, but a peril. The
insect braves with impunity mephitic miasms
and powerful odours. They are too much for
the spider. Immediately stricken, she falls
into convulsions. Chloroform, which a
stag-beetle will resist for a fortnight or more, will
instantly prostrate a spider, at the first
contact, as if she were stricken by a
thunderbolt.

                     FIRE-WORSHIPPERS.

IN the days of frost or mist and chilly
rain, we are disposed especially to believe
all the good that can be said about
fire-worship. Dosabhoy Framjee tells us, in a
book, entitled "The Parsees, their history,
manners, customs, and religion," all about
his fellow flame-lovers. He is a young Parsee
himself; native of Bombay. He grew up
there, educated at the Elphinstone College
into the form of an active minded
Indo-Persian Englishman, a double patriot, true
to our nation in the past and in the present;
loyal alike to the by-gone King Darius and
the reigning Queen Victoria. Dosabhoy
Framjee edited, in Bombay, an English
newspaper; and, when the recent mutiny was
at its height, published a pamphlet in two
native languages, to warn his countrymen
against the madness of their attempt to
overthrow the government. Then his desire
was to make the tendencies of the English
favourably known to his neighbours. Now
(at the age of twenty-eight) he issues an
English book in England, of which the design
is to make his compatriots favourably
known to the English: better acquaintance
being the true peace-maker among reasonable
men.

The same thing is true of customs that
have held their ground for ages in the mind
of any people. Men and women are, on the
whole, good fellows at bottom, however ugly
some of them may seem to be. Whenever
any custom or belief has taken long and firm
hold of entire nations of human beings, it
may be safely assumed, either that it is
imposed by necessity, or that its firm hold on
the heart is by the growth of wholesome
rootlets. Its fruit may be bitter—even
poisonous—and yet it is to be compared rather
to a tree pushing its living roots through
wholesome soil, than to a rotten pole stuck
upright in a quagmire. Now, therefore,
while we are all over England, Scotland, and
Ireland, friends of that part of the doctrine
of Zoroaster which demands that fires shall
be kept up, regards as a heinous offence the
letting of them out, let us put Dosabhoy
Framjee in the warmest corner of the
chimney, cheer his eyes with the mighty
blaze, and hear what he can tell us about
Fire-worship. As a Parsee he is qualified to
teach us.

At the time of the dissolution of the Persian
empire, in the year six hundred and fifty,
the few Persians who were faithful to their
creed fled to the mountains of Khorassan,