no unusual features in the pastime of drunkenness in this city as yet. Its eventual effect will, of course, depend greatly upon the leniency or strictness of the authorities." Now, that drunkenness is both a vice and a sin is not to be questioned; but, if the law-making power sets out to punish vices and sins, it will have its hands full, and will attempt an impossible task. The world has tried this experiment in almost all ages, and uniformly without success. Not very many years ago the ordinances of the Church were in some countries enforced by law; and even now some nations, and, I am sorry to say, some of the States of this very Union of ours, inflict severe punishments upon profane swearers and blasphemers, thus again punishing sins and vices as though they were crimes. A sin or a vice does not necessarily inflict injury upon others, whereas a crime does. Drunkenness is not of itself, properly speaking, a crime; but if a person through his drunkenness creates disorder in the streets, or is offensive in any respect to those with whom he comes in contact, he ought to be punished to just that extent that his disorderly or offensive conduct requires. It is almost impossible for a person to be drunk in the public streets without being in some degree disorderly and offensive, and he is very properly arrested and fined or imprisoned. But if any law can be more ridiculous, more outrageous in its influence upon the liberty of the citizen, it is this one which the State of Minnesota has recently enacted. A man, for instance, in the sanctity of his own house gets quietly drunk and goes to bed. He has injured no living being but himself, and he has a right to injure himself if he is such a fool. He has a legal right to cut off his hand, or to knock out his teeth, or to punch out his eye, even though by these acts he does inflict injury indirectly upon those who are dependent upon him. He has a natural right to take his own life, and though the State of New York (the only community, to my knowledge, that has such a law upon its statute-book) makes the attempt at self-destruction a crime, the law is so absurd that no one yet has been punished under it. Moreover, the Minnesota law against drunkenness is almost impossible of enforcement, unless under such a system of espionage and domiciliary visiting as would render it intolerable to any people having a spark of manliness or independence in their character. Think of a police officer armed with a warrant entering a man's house, finding him in bed and in an apparent state of insensibility. He applies the only test known to the average policeman, and smells the breath of his potential victim. He detects the odor of alcohol, and straightway drags the supposed offender before a magistrate. The man may have had a headache, and have taken a glass of wine or of some other liquor; he is naturally indignant at being treated in so outrageous a manner, and utters his protest in no measured language; his conduct only serves to convince his captors that the charge based upon the odor of alcohol is well founded, and he is mulcted in forty or sixty dollars, or sent to the workhouse for ninety days, as the case may be. No one is safe under such a law; it is often a very difficult matter to determine whether a person is drunk or sober, and frequently it is impossible even by the most minute examination. Again, some people become intoxicated from a single glass of champagne, while others will drink two or more bottles with impunity. It is manifestly unjust to allow an individual peculiarity like this to establish the guilt or innocence of an accused person. As I have said, why stop at making drunkenness a crime when there are other vices far more immoral and more destructive to the character of the perpetrator? Why not enact a law against lying? There are laws against slander, which injures the one against whom it is directed, and they are well enough, for to injure another is a crime. But lying in the abstract remains unnoticed by the penal statutes, though a more degrading vice in the eyes of all civilized mankind than mere drunkenness. On the first of June of the year 1889 a statute went into effect in the State of New York which prohibits, under severe penalties, the selling of cigarettes to minors under the age of sixteen; and the State of Michigan has recently not only enacted a similar law, but goes farther, and interdicts the manufacture of cigarettes within the limits of the State. Is it to be supposed for one moment that minors under the age of sixteen in either State smoke fewer cigarettes than they did before these laws were passed ? How is the vender to know in many cases whether the applicant for cigarettes is over sixteen or not? And is there any difficulty for any minor to get a companion who is undoubtedly over sixteen, or some one else, to buy cigarettes for him? Legislatures that pass such laws, and governors that sign them, are apparently ignorant of the first principles of jurisprudence. I venture to say that even now, although not two weeks have elapsed since the act went into effect, it is practically a dead letter in the city of New York and throughout the State generally, and I am quite sure that not a single conviction will ever be obtained under its provisions. I am not certain that our society did its full duty in not protesting against the statute-books being encumbered with such rubbish. Cigarette-smoking by minors is an evil to be suppressed by proper instruction and by the intervention of parents and guardians. If these latter can not prevent it, it is quite certain that all the policemen in the State, backed by all the majesty of this particular law, will have their labor for their pains. THE STRENGTH OF SPIDERS AND SPIDER-WEBS.* BY HENRY C. MCCOOK, D. D. THE frailty of a spider's web has passed into a proverb. Yet, comparatively, the silken line of an orb-weaver is very strong. According to Schaffenberger, it requires ninety spinning threads of an Epeïra to yield one thread of the thickness of a caterpillar's thread; and, according to Leeuwenhoek, it requires eighteen thousand spider lines to make the thickness of a hair of the beard. These comparisons are suggestive, although in a measure deceptive, since there are vast differences in the size of the threads woven by Epeïroids. It is probable that the extraordinary strength of the thread is due to the superposition of a large number of extremely minute threads. However, after the thread is woven, Meckel could not recognize it as consisting of more than eight to ten strands. A geometric snare, whether vertical or horizontal, must be strong enough to sustain the weight of a spider of considerable size, such as Argiope cophinaria or Epeïra insularis, particularly when the female is heavy with eggs. Blackwell thus determined by experiment the strength of a line by which a female Epeïra diademata, weighing ten grains, had sustained itself from a twig: He attached to the extremity of the line a small piece of muslin with the corners nearly drawn together, so as to form a minute sack, into which he carefully introduced sixty-one grains' weight in succession, being more than six times the weight of the spider. On the addition of half a grain more the line broke. Not only must an orb sustain the weight and movements of its maker, but it must also have sufficient strength to hold the various insects which strike upon it. Bees and wasps are sometimes able to break through the spiral meshes of a large snare, but generally the threads are strong enough to hold them, in spite of their struggles, until the proprietor can enswathe them. Moreover, the orb-web must be able to sustain the weight of evening dews. One who has seen such snares in the early morning, when every viscid bead appears to have attracted to itself an incasing armor of silvery dew, and has noticed how the spiral strings are bagged down under the weight of the same (Fig. 1), must have inferred that the snare was able to support a comparatively heavy burden. The same is true concerning summer showers, which must fall very heavily, and be driven before a pretty strong wind, in order to batter down a well-constructed orb-web. * Reprinted from Vol. I of American Spiders and their Spinning-Work, by the kind permission of the author, to whom we are also indebted for the accompanying illustrations, An illustration of the remarkable strength and elasticity of the foundation lines of orb-webs appears in a biographical notice of the distinguished astronomer, the late General Ormsby M. Mitchell, ficiently minute and elastic to con FIG. 1.-SECTOR OF A DEW-LADEN ORB-WEB. (Magnified.) stitute the physical union between the top stem of the cross and the clock pendulum. Various materials were tried, among others a delicate human hair, the very finest that could be obtained, but this was too coarse and stiff. Its want of pliancy and elasticity gave to the minute "wire cross" an irregular motion, and caused it to rebound from the globule of mercury into which it should have plunged. "After many fruitless attempts," says Prof. Mitchell, "an appeal was made to an artisan of wonderful dexterity-the assistance of the spider was invoked; his web, perfectly elastic and perfectly pliable, was furnished, and this material connection between the wire cross and the clock pendulum proved to be exactly the thing required. In proof of this remark I need only state the fact that one single spider's web has fulfilled the delicate duty of moving the wire cross, lifting it, and again permitting it to dip into the mercury every second of time for a period of more than three years! How much longer it might have faithfully performed the same service I know not, as it then became necessary to break this admirable bond, to make some changes in the clock. Here it will be seen that the same web was expanded and contracted each second during the whole period, and yet never, so far as could be observed, lost any portion of its elasticity." At various times there have been placed on record accounts of the capture by spiders of small vertebrate animals, as snakes, mice, and birds. Popular stories to the same effect have from time to time been sent the rounds of the daily press, and found utterance and often illustration, the latter sometimes of a most original and remarkable character, in popular magazine literature. The great seeming disparity, in such cases, between the size and vigor of captive and prisoner; the confusion of the various narratives in details as to the species and behavior of the spider, and the characteristics of her snare; the radical departure from known food habit of species that are insectivorous; together with the fact that the accounts all have come from lay observers, have been more or less lacking in scientific accuracy and minuteness of detail, and wholly without scientific verification-these considerations have caused such records and reports to be discredited by arachnologists and naturalists generally. But there are a few cases, confirmed by circumstantial evidence, and reported by observers of good reputation and careful habit, which deserve notice. The physical powers of the Lycoside, the popular running, ground, or wolf spiders, are well illustrated by an instance recorded in the proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. The result as reported was achieved by pure strength and activity, without any of the mechanical advantages of a snare. Mr. Spring, while walking with a friend in a swampy wood, which was pierced by a dike three feet wide, was attracted by the extraordinary movements of a large black spider in the middle of a ditch. Closer examination showed that the creature had caught a fish! She had fastened upon it with a deadly grip just on the forward side of the dorsal fin, and the poor fish was swimming round and round slowly, or twisting its body as if in pain (Fig. 2). The head of its black enemy was sometimes almost pulled under water, but the strength of the fish would not permit an entire submersion. It moved its fins as if exhausted, and often rested. Finally it swam under a floating leaf near the shore and made a vain effort to dislodge the spider by scraping against the under side of the leaf. The two had now closely approached the bank. Suddenly the long black legs of the spider emerged from the water, and the hinder ones reached out and fastened upon the irregularities of |