The reference to the sweeping away of the spider’s web, of course, implies the pain often caused to such hardworking girls by the meanness of men who employ them only to cheat them—­shopkeepers or manufacturers who take their work without justly paying for it, and who criticize it as bad in order to force the owner to accept less money than it is worth.  Again a reference may be intended to the destruction of the home by some legal trick—­some unscrupulous method of cheating the daughter out of the property bequeathed to her by her parents.

Notice a few pretty words here.  The “pearled” as applied to the spider’s thread gives an intimation of the effect produced by dew on the thread, but there is also the suggestion of tears upon the thread work woven by the hands of the girl.  The participle “anchored” is very pretty in its use here as an adjective, because this word is now especially used for rope-fastening, whether the rope be steel or hemp; and particularly for the fastening of the cables of a bridge.  The last stanza might be paraphrased thus:  “Sister Spider, I know more than you—­and that knowledge makes me unhappy.  You do not know, when you are spinning your little web, that you are really weaving your own shroud.  But I know this, my work is slowly but surely killing me.  And I know it because I have a soul—­at least a mind made otherwise than yours.”

The use of the word “soul” in the last stanza of this poem, brings me back to the question put forth in an earlier part of the lecture—­why European poets, during the last two thousand years, have written so little upon the subject of insects?  Three thousand, four thousand years ago, the most beautiful Greek poetry—­poetry more perfect than anything of English poetry—­was written upon insects.  In old Japanese literature poems upon insects are to be found by thousands.  What is the signification of the great modern silence in Western countries upon this delightful topic?  I believe that Christianity, as dogma, accounts for the long silence.  The opinions of the early Church refused soul, ghost, intelligence of any sort to other creatures than man.  All animals were considered as automata—­that is, as self-acting machines, moved by a something called instinct, for want of a better name.  To talk about the souls of animals or the spirits of animals would have been very dangerous in the Middle Ages, when the Church had supreme power; it would indeed have been to risk or to invite an accusation of witchcraft, for demons were then thought to take the shape of animals at certain times.  To discuss the mind of an animal would have been for the Christian faith to throw doubt upon the existence of human souls as taught by the Church; for if you grant that animals are able to think, then you must acknowledge that man is able to think without a soul, or you must acknowledge that the soul is not the essential principle of thought and action.  Until after the time of Descartes, who later argued philosophically that animals were only machines, it was scarcely possible to argue rationally about the matter in Europe.