A Book of Spiders King Penguin book by W.�S. Bristowe : Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Some tanning wear and marking due to age. Year 1947. Hardcover. English. See images for condition.

Format: Hardcover

Author: W.�S. Bristowe

ISBN:

Condition: Used - Good


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About the book >.>.> Spiders are a matter of taste. There will be few so fond of them as the "great lady still living" who, as described by the Rev. E. Topsell in 1607, "will not leave off eating them." Indeed, the death of Professor J. Ross of Aberdeen University in 1777 from the effects, it was said, of swallowing a spider in his glass of claret supports the old saying that "one man's meat is another man's poison." Though Topsell, their most ardent admirer of all time, could write: "I know not what it was that made Pennius so frighted when he thought of eating spiders," history shows that many a brave man has winced at less. Elizabeth Cook's Journal tells us "Turenne and Gustavus Adolphus shuddered at the sight of a spider," and Cardinal Wolsey had a horror of the long-legged House Spiders (Tegenaria parietina) he encountered at Hampton Court. Not so Topsell. Hear what beauty he discerned in a House Spider: "The skin of it is so soft, smooth, polished and neat, that she precedes the softest skinned Mayds, and the daintiest and most beautiful Strumpets she hath fingers that the most gallant Virgins desire to have theirs like them, long, slender, round, of exact feeling, that there is no man, nor any creature, that can compare with her." His belief in their virtue was no less intense than his admiration of their form: "The running of the eyes is stopped with the dung and urine of a House Spider dropt in with Oyl of Roses or one dram of Saffron, or else laid on alone with Wool: whereby you may know that there is nothing so filthy in a spider that it is not good for something." Now Topsell actually watched spiders, saw them mate, and knew they laid eggs, so it is strange he should write in his History of Four-footed Beasts and Serpents: "It is manifest that Spiders are bred of some aereall seeds putrefied." (LL)