I will keep the technical descriptions and linguistic analysis for another time and place. The purpose of this lecture is, as I said, to safeguard the rights of Brazilian science with this timely protest, and, having done so, to tell you about the ways in which I consider my own work superior to that of that English expert. I will need to demonstrate this, and for that reason I ask for your close attention.

Within one month, I had collected twenty spiders; the following month, there were fifty-five and, by March 1877, four hundred and ninety. The two main factors involved in collecting them were: using their language as soon as I began to discern something of it, together with the sheer terror I instilled in them. My height, my flowing vestments, and my mastery of their language all made them believe that I was the god of spiders, and, from that point on, they worshipped me. And behold the benefits of their delusion. I followed their every action with great attention and detail, jotting down all my observations in a notebook, which they believed to be a record of their sins, thus reinforcing still further their virtuous behavior. My flute was also of great assistance. As you know, or should know, spiders are quite mad about music.

Mere association was not enough; I needed to give them a suitable form of government. I hesitated in my choice of system; many of the current forms seemed to me adequate, some even excellent, but they all had the disadvantage of already existing. Let me explain. Any current form of government would expose them to comparisons that might be used to belittle them. I needed either to find a brand-new system, or to reintroduce one that had long since been abandoned. Naturally, I chose the latter, and nothing seemed more fitting than a republic in the Venetian mold; I even adopted the same epithet. This obsolete system, which was, in general terms, unlike any other current system of government, had the added advantage of all complicated mechanisms, namely, it would put my young society’s political skills to the test.

There was another motive behind my choice. Among the various electoral methods once used in the Venice of old was the bag and ball, which is how the sons of the nobility were initiated into matters of state. Balls bearing the candidates’ names were placed in the bag, and every year a certain number were taken out, with the chosen few being deemed suitable for public service. Such a system will provoke laughter among experts in electoral suffrage, but that is not the case with me. For it precludes the follies of passion, the errors of ineptitude, and the commingling of corruption and greed. This was not my only reason for choosing it; I felt that a community so skilled in the spinning of webs would find the use of the electoral bag easy to adapt to, indeed almost second nature.