I hear some laughter among the other curious murmurings. One must always strive to overcome one’s prejudices, gentlemen. Spiders may strike you as inferior precisely because you do not know them. You love your dogs and hold cats and hens in high esteem, and yet you fail to notice that the humble spider neither jumps nor barks like a dog, nor meows like a cat, nor clucks like a hen. Nor does it buzz or bite like a mosquito, or rob us of our blood and sleep the way fleas do. All these creatures are the very model of vagrant parasites. Even the ant, so praised for certain qualities, preys upon our sugar and our crops, and builds its home by stealing someone else’s. The spider, gentlemen, neither troubles nor defrauds us; indeed, it catches flies, our sworn enemies. The spider spins, weaves, works, and dies. What better example could there be of patience, order, foresight, respect, and, dare I say it, humanity? As for its talents, there can be no doubt. From Pliny to Darwin, naturalists the world over speak as one in praise of this tiny bug, whose marvelous web is destroyed in less than a minute by your servant’s thoughtless broom. And if time permitted, I would now repeat all of these men’s wise opinions; however, I have a lot to get through and so must be brief. I have them here, not quite all of them, but almost; I have, for example, this excellent monograph by Büchner, who studied the psychological lives of animals with such perspicacity. In citing Darwin and Büchner, I am, of course, merely paying due respect to two geniuses of the first order, without (as my vestments attest) in any way absolving them of the unfounded and erroneous theories of materialism.