Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 272, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 November 1912 — SPIDER A FRIEND OF MANKIND [ARTICLE]

SPIDER A FRIEND OF MANKIND

Really Undeserving of the Enmity That Is Felt Toward Him by the Average Housewife. Aside from snakes, there Is probably no living thing which can look to mankind for friendship with so little hope as the spider, yet when the spider is fairly brought to trial it is rather hard to prove anything against him except his appearance and a few cobwebs. Apart from furnishing an example of industry and patience from which we might well profit, the spider .feeds exclusively upon freshly

Aside from snakes, there Is probably no living thing which can look to mankind for friendship with so little hope as the spider, yet when the spider is fairly brought to trial it is rather hard to prove anything against him except his appearance and a few cobwebs. Apart from furnishing an example of industry and patience from which we might well profit, the spider .feeds exclusively upon freshly killed insects, all of them being of the kind denounced by sanitary authorities, the house fly being its favorite quarry. As the actual destruction of a few hundred house flies means that several hundred thousand that would otherwise have spent gay lives transmitting typhoid and other diseases will not come Into existence, and as almost any spider should be able to account for as many as three hundred In the course of a summer, to say nothing of stray mosquitoes and black gnats, we Burely owe him something more than a flap with a

slipper when we happen to catch him out of his hole. A spider can bite, of course, but be Beldom does exefept in self-defense, and even then the bite is not worse than would have been received frem any one of the several hundred mosquitoes he has probably dined upon, or will, if let alone. In the light of present scientific knowledge, the story of the spider and the fly that was invited into the pretty parlor does not cause such a surge of sympathy for the fly as it once did. —Harper’s Weekly.