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misdirected. Thus, in every point of view, the money spent in war is misspent. And how surprising do some of the facts of this expenditure appear! The expenditure on the British army and navy in 1868, for instance, was nearly three times the amount of all the government grants for the promotion of education in England and Scotland during the thirty previous years. The United States, during the fifty years following 1789, spent, in military and naval equipments (which were only employed one or two years in actual war), three hundred and sixty millions sterling; being seven times more than what they spent on all other national affairs whatever. Our own debt of above eight hundred millions represents only a part of our expenditure in war during the last hundred years.

War not only takes largely of our existing means, besides anticipating the future, but it paralyses and blights the powers by which means are acquired. The commerce of a country is usually much deranged by war, in consequence of the shutting up of certain markets, and the danger incurred in reaching others. Manufacturers are consequently thrown idle. All this descends in incalculable miseries upon the humbler classes.

But perhaps the most fatal effect of war is the lowering of the moral tone of a people. It introduces a new set of objects to public notice, and sets all their sympathies into wrong directions. Idle parade and gewgaws take the place of solidly useful matters; men worship what destroys; merit is estimated, not by the extent of good that a man does, but by his power of inflicting evil. The modest benefactors of their race are overlooked; while praise is heaped upon him who has shewn an unusual amount of perhaps merely animal courage, or at best exercised ingenuity in inflicting suffering upon his fellow-creatures. In the progress of such a dispute with another nation, the selfish feelings are called into powerful play. We wish for victory, and seek to obtain it, without the least regard to the merits of the case. Our own country and cause, right or wrong,' is practically the maxim of all belligerent parties. This selfishness and injustice diffuses itself into the administration of the government, and even into private affairs; so that corruption, peculation, contrabandism, and fraud abound on all hands. In such a state of things, all that conduces to moral progress is sensibly checked; and it may be said that, for every year spent in war, we should require five to do away with its bad effects, and enable us to start at the point where we formerly were.

It is not wonderful that war should be so disadvantageous; for men are constituted in such a way as to be benefited only by mutual kindness and a firm union, and not by doing each other harm. It is a great mistake to suppose even that we can be benefited in the long-run by only consulting our own interests; a much greater mistake is it to suppose that we can, as a rule, derive good from what does harm to our neighbours. All our highest gratifications

are found in the efforts we make to give happiness to others; it is a thing which requires to come, either originally or by reflection, from a fellow-creature; it has no spontaneous fount in ourselves. A nation, therefore, on the outlook for happiness to itself, would need to promote the benefit of its neighbours; it should seek to form friendly relations with them, to promote an interchange of benefits by commerce and other means; to do them, in short, all the good in its power. By these, but by no other means can nations experience benefit from each other's neighbourhood. It is to be lamented that this principle has not as yet been much acted upon; but wherever it has in any degree been put in practice, it has succeeded. As yet, we see governments for the most part disposed to take precautionary measures against each other, as more fearing each other as enemies, than disposed to trust each other as capable of being made friends. And thus a policy of suspicion, attended with immense expense, is established amongst states. France keeps up an army and navy, lest Britain should some day fall upon her. Britain does the same, dreading some outbreak on the part of France. Forts are raised beside harbours, to protect shipping from these imaginary hostilities. Half the men who are at the prime of life are obliged to go into discipline as soldiers for a month per annum, that they may be ready to repel any assault from their neighbours, who are drilling under the same terror for them. Thus money is misexpended, and human labour misapplied, to an enormous amount, from a mere sentiment of jealousy-a fear which actually engenders its own assailants. How strange that no people have ever yet been found capable of the gallantry of saying to a neighbour: 'We arm not, for we mean no harm, and wish to apprehend none here we offer you love instead of hostility: you are too magnanimous, in such circumstances, to refuse the one or offer the other!' No nation civilised to the degree of those in Western Europe, could withstand a communication of this nature: it would, like Orlando, blush and hide its sword. There is nothing Quixotic in this doctrine. It proceeds upon the most familiar principles in human nature; namely, that an honest good-will generates the same in the bosoms to which it is addressed. Would governments but try the relaxation of an import duty instead of the putting a warvessel into commission, would they but hold out a friendly hand in any case of exigency-such as occurred when Hamburg was burnt -instead of raising up jealous forts and martello towers, they would find how much better it was to do good than to threaten or presume evil, and how truly

LOVE IS POWER.

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ITH the appearance and workmanship of the little creatures called spiders, every one must be more or less familiar. They belong to the great division of Invertebrate Animals called Articulata. At one time they were included by naturalists in the class of Insects; but a more minute examination of their form and general development has caused them to be disjoined from the Insecta, and formed, along with mites, ticks, and scorpions, into a separate class, called Arachnida, intermediate between Insecta and Crustacea.

There are several hundred species of spiders-some large, some small; some of a dull sombre hue, others brilliantly coloured; some that Olabide in human dwellings, others that inhabit the fields and forests; some that have the means of floating gathemselves through the air, others whose means of locomotion are confined to their legs. At first sight, the body of the spider appears to be a roundish soft ball, supported on long jointed legs; but, on narrow inspection, the ball-like mass constitutes only the wlod abdomen or hinder portion, the true body and head No. 35.

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forming the anterior portion, which is small in comparison. To this section the legs are attached, these being eight in number -two more than insects are furnished with. Spiders are destitute of antenna-those feelers which proceed from the heads of insects-but are provided with a pair of saw-like pincers, which terminate in sharp points. These points are perforated by a small hole, through which the animal emits a poison, which is eminently fatal to most of the smaller insects. These pincers lie folded one upon the other, and are never extended unless in defence, or in the capture of prey. The eyes are simple, and not compound, like those of insects; and are generally six or eight in number, dispersed over the head so as to command a wide range of vision. The arrangement of the eyes varies much in the different families and genera which are distinguished by naturalists. Spiders are all strictly air-breathing animals, and their apparatus for this purpose differs from that of insects. Their skin, or crust, is more leathery than horny; and this they cast periodically during their lifetime. Like crabs and some other animals, they have the power of reproducing lost limbs-a casualty to which their predatory habits render them frequently liable.

One of the most remarkable features in the structure and economy of spiders is the power which many of them possess of emitting slender threads of a silk-like substance, of which they construct nets, or long dangling cables; and on these some of them, as the

gossamer-spiders, are buoyed through the air with nearly as much facility as though they had been furnished with wings. The apparatus provided by nature for elaborating and emitting the spider's web is a beautiful piece of mechanism. Within the animal there are several little bags or vesicles containing a gummy matter; and these vesicles are connected with a circular orifice situated at the abdomen. Within this orifice are five little teats, or spinnerets, through which the thread is drawn, as represented in the accompanying figure; and on its exposure to the air, the soft gummy substance immediately hardens into a thread. It must not be concluded, however, that there is only a simple thread produced by each spinneret ; the fact is, these teats are studded with thousands of minute tubes, too small for the naked eye to perceive, and each of these emits a thread of inconceivable fineness. These minute tubes are known as spinnerules, and the films which proceed from them unite like so many strands of a rope, to form the thread by which a

spider suspends itself, or of which it forms its net. The finest thread which human mechanism can produce, is like a ship's cable compared with the delicate films which flow

from the spinnerules of the largest spider. These films are all distinctly separate on coming from the spinneret; but unite, as shewn in the adjoining cut, at a short distance, not by any twisting process, but merely by their own glutinous or gummy nature. Thus, the spinning apparatus of the disdained spider, when viewed by the eye of science, becomes one of the most wonderful pieces of animated mechanism, and is of itself sufficient to establish that nothing short of Divinity could have framed it. The animal has great command over this apparatus, and can apply it at will so long as the receptacles within are replenished with the gummy fluid; but as soon as this gum is exhausted, all its efforts to spin are

fruitless, and it must wait till nature, by her inscrutable chemistry, has secreted it from the food which is devoured.

With regard to the sexes, male spiders are always much smaller than the females of the same species, being sometimes not more than one-fourth the size. The female lays a considerable number of round whitish eggs, which, by some species, are merely dropped into a crevice, without any protection; by others they are enclosed in a globular cover of web; and by many they are deposited in an irregular mass, and then worked over with a soft envelope. The attention which they pay to these cocoons almost equals that of the ant for its larvæ. A spider may be often seen dragging a ball of eggs much larger than its own body; and though scared, will return again and again to secure its charge. We once deprived a gardenspider of its eggs, and covered them slightly with earth; the animal scampered away for a few feet, and then gathered up its legs, and lay down as if dead. In a short time, when all was quiet, it returned to the spot, and searched round every clod and pellet till it ultimately discovered the object of its search, which it gently uncovered, cleaned, enveloped with a few rounds of fresh web, and then bore rapidly away to a secret crevice. So powerful, indeed, is the spider's affection for her young, that, according to Professor Hentz, 'all her limbs, one by one, may be torn from her body without forcing her to abandon her hold. But if, without mangling the mother, the cocoon be skilfully removed from her, and suddenly thrown out of sight, she instantaneously loses all her activity, seems paralysed, and coils her tremulous limbs as if mortally wounded. If the bag be returned, her ferocity and strength are restored the moment she has any perception of its presence, and she rushes to her treasure to defend it to the

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