‘Might always has the best of the argument,’ said La Fontaine, to the great scandal of the peace-lovers.  The exigencies of verse, rhyme and rhythm, carried the worthy fabulist further than he intended:  he meant to say that, in a fight between mastiffs and in other brute conflicts, the stronger is left master of the bone.  He well knew that, as things go, success is no certificate of excellence.  Others came, the notorious evil-doers of humanity, who made a law of the savage maxim that might is right.

We are the larvae with the changing skins, the ugly caterpillars of a society that is slowly, very slowly, wending its way to the triumph of right over might.  When will this sublime metamorphosis be accomplished?  To free ourselves from those wild-beast brutalities, must we wait for the ocean-plains of the southern hemisphere to flow to our side, changing the face of continents and renewing the glacial period of the Reindeer and the Mammoth?  Perhaps, so slow is moral progress.

True, we have the bicycle, the motor-car, the dirigible airship and other marvellous means of breaking our bones; but our morality is not one rung the higher for it all.  One would even say that, the farther we proceed in our conquest of matter, the more our morality recedes.  The most advanced of our inventions consists in bringing men down with grapeshot and explosives with the swiftness of the reaper mowing the corn.

Would we see this might triumphant in all its beauty?  Let us spend a few weeks in the Epeira’s company.  She is the owner of a web, her work, her most lawful property.  The question at once presents itself:  Does the Spider possibly recognize her fabric by certain trademarks and distinguish it from that of her fellows?

I bring about a change of webs between two neighbouring Banded Epeirae.  No sooner is either placed upon the strange net than she makes for the central floor, settles herself head downwards and does not stir from it, satisfied with her neighbour’s web as with her own.  Neither by day nor by night does she try to shift her quarters and restore matters to their pristine state.  Both Spiders think themselves in their own domain.  The two pieces of work are so much alike that I almost expected this.

I then decide to effect an exchange of webs between two different species.  I move the Banded Epeira to the net of the Silky Epeira and vice versa.  The two webs are now dissimilar; the Silky Epeira’s has a limy spiral consisting of closer and more numerous circles.  What will the Spiders do, when thus put to the test of the unknown?  One would think that, when one of them found meshes too wide for her under her feet, the other meshes too narrow, they would be frightened by this sudden change and decamp in terror.  Not at all.  Without a sign of perturbation, they remain, plant themselves in the centre and await the coming of the game, as though nothing extraordinary had happened.  They do more than this.  Days pass and, as long as the unfamiliar web is not wrecked to the extent of being unserviceable, they make no attempt to weave another in their own style.  The Spider, therefore, is incapable of recognizing her web.  She takes another’s work for hers, even when it is produced by a stranger to her race.