Word: spider
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...What kind of confidence," asked London's conservative Daily Sketch, "can Britain have in such naive tourists who wander happily into the spider's web and expect to tie a bow around his neck...
Entomologists are forever disagreeing about ants. Some insist that the ant is brainier and better organized than man; others regard the ant as a slothful, inconsistent dimwit which gets along solely on a few inherited habits. John (The Life of the Spider) Crompton, a British expert, strikes a sprightly middle course. In a new book, Ways of the Ant (Houghton Mifflin; $3.50), he declares that ants, banded together in communities, have evolved emotions, "discipline and intelligence of a high order," even though the individual ant may be a nincompoop compared to a go-it-alone housefly. Some of Author Crompton...
...Doctor and author (Autocrat of the Breakfast Table): 1KNOW I might have made an indifferent lawyer-and I think I may make a tolerable physician-I did not like the one, and I do like the other ... If you would wax thin and savage, like a half-starved spider-be a lawyer; if you would go off like an opium eater in love with your starry delusions-be a doctor." A. J. CRONIN
Animals have been artists for millions of years, says Lancaster, although "their theories remain sealed in [their] little minds." The spider, for example, "is a marvelous craftsman . . . The common orb web is a triumph of symmetry and artistry." Then there is the ant, a master organizer, engineer and architect, and the termite, whose elaborate constructions make use of "scientific exposures to light and air, air ducts and airconditioning, concrete walls, roofs and gutters for shedding rain...
...Spiders & Guillotines. The famed Holmesian deductive method is also unchanged. In "The Deptford Horror," for example, it is soon clear that Mr. Theobold Wilson is a left-handed man with a Cuban background. "Your [walking] stick is cut from Cuban ebony," says Sherlock, "[and] there is a slight but regular scraping . . . along the left side of the handle, just where the ring finger of a left-handed man would close upon the grip." "Dear me, how simple," chuckles Mr. Wilson, blandly leading Holmes down to the cellar stove in which he keeps two specimens of the Galeodes spider-"the horror...