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The Life of the Spider

Jean-Henri Fabre

Book Overview: 

Jean-Henri Casimir Fabre was a French entomologist and author. He was born in St. Léons in Aveyron, France. Fabre was largely an autodidact, owing to the poverty of his family. Nevertheless, he acquired a primary teaching certificate at the young age of 19 and began teaching at the college of Ajaccio, Corsica, called Carpentras.

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Book Excerpt: 
. . .By means of this alternate motion, interspersed with numerous contacts, a segment of the sheet is obtained, of a very accurate texture.  When this is done, the Spider moves a little along a circular line and the loom works in the same manner on another segment.

The silk disk, a sort of hardly concave paten, now no longer receives aught from the spinnerets in its centre; the marginal belt alone increases in thickness.  The piece thus becomes a bowl-shaped porringer, surrounded by a wide, flat edge.

The time for the laying has come.  With one quick emission, the viscous, pale-yellow eggs are laid in the basin, where they heap together in the shape of a globe which projects largely outside the cavity.  The spinnerets are once more set going.  With short movements, as the tip of the abdomen rises and falls to weave the round mat, they cover up the exposed hemisphere.  The result is a pill set in the middle of a circular carpet.

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Community Reviews

a bit repetitive/long winded - but the ‘gentleman scientist’ voice is charming and I learned some interesting Spider Facts.

”The Spider that showed me the exodus in all its magnificence is known officially as Thomisus onustus, WALCK. Though the name suggest nothing to the reader's mind, it has the advantage, at any rate, of hurting neither the throat nor the ear, as is too often the case with scientific nomenclature, whi

Quaint, superbly old fashioned, yet insightful and full of wonder and curiosity for the natural world. Something that mixes the childlike wonder and fascination of the world with the probing and knowledge hungry essence of science.
Jean-Henri Fabre is the naturalist we all want to be when imagining

Details, not dry facts but observations gathered so carefully and then presented as a beautiful web, get the reader up and close to a few types of spiders native to the author’s neighborhood. Through these types, we learn how they build their homes, how they catch their food, how they mate, and how

Surprisingly, this was a big favorite with the kids--archaic language and all. Rather than fearing spiders, they are now plotting to capture some of our more impressive neighbors for closer observation. The author's descriptions of his close, patient study helped turn my children into little natural

As someone who has mild arachnophobia, I enjoyed reading this book.

It presents spiders from an objective perspective: they're not scary, they're wild animals (predators, to be more precise; and they're very good at it). Their instincts are geared towards about eating, mating and staying alive. Despi

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