|
Spiders In General
The subject of the origin of instincts will be further considered under our next heading. But while we have before us the subject of spiders, the following from Orton?s Zoology will be of interest:
"Spiders are provided at the posterior end with two or three pairs of appendages called spinnerets, which are homologous with legs. The office of the spinnerets is to reel out the silk from the silk-glands, the tip being perforated by a myriad of little tubes, through which the silk escapes in excessively fine threads.
An ordinary thread, just visible to the naked eye, is the union of a thousand or more of these delicate streams of silk. These primary threads are drawn out and united by the hind legs."
Here we find a marvelous coordination of special organs: (1) the silk-glands, capable of secreting a fluid which has the remarkable property of hardening upon exposure to the air; (2) spinnerets, having each more than a thousand perforations of microscopic size, without which the silk-glands would be worse than useless; (3) hind legs, having the wonderful function of forming the thousands of invisible filaments into a thread, without which function both glands and spinnerets would be a serious detriment to their possessor. It is simply impossible that these three organs should have developed gradually, and independently of each other, to the stage of perfection, in advance of which stage they could not cooperate in the slightest degree to the one end for which they all exist.
Let it be noted that, if the spinnerets had but one aperture, or a dozen, or even a hundred, the liquid material would not have the required area of exposure to the air to effect that instant solidification which is absolutely essential to the success of the entire operation. It required at least a thousand apertures to produce the desired result. Who knew, or could have known, the need of such a number of orifices? or could have formed them in a tube the size of a spider?s leg? And in what imaginable way could several legs, intended for locomotion, be evolved into organs so radically different in function? It is not too much to say that those thousands of orifices are just so many witnesses that Evolution is a huge delusion, which has made foolish the wisdom of the wise, and has exposed to deserved ridicule the gullibility of the brightest minds.
|