Spiders. 139 



much about anything in particular. So he lays off his 

 picture of a spider's web with a pair of dividers, and 

 people marvel at the spider's mathematical sense, 

 whereas a spider doesn't bother her head with any such 

 foolishness. She puts her lines where she thinks they 

 will do the most good, regardless of their distance apart. 

 Here of late, though, I think I have noticed a little 

 improvement in artists. They have begun to notice that 

 the spider always stands head downward in her web, if 

 it be a perpendicular one, and if it is horizontal hangs 

 back downward. Some of these flat-w r eb spiders can 

 hardly walk right side up. But the spider of art never 

 has more than six legs, while the real spider has eight, 

 and the spider of art often has three sections of the body 

 while the real spider never has more than two. The 

 head and chest are in one department, so to speak. 

 There are their eyes, from four to eight in number and 

 disposed in different patterns according to their political 

 affiliations; their jaws, which work sidewise instead of up 

 and down, their poison-bag and a few other arrange- 

 ments, and in the abdomen or silk department are the 

 heart (a banana-shaped affair), the liver, the slit and tubes 

 that do duty for lungs, and the spinnerets. These last 

 are warty-looking affairs that may be spread apart and 

 brought together exactly like the thumb and fingers of 

 the hand. Each wart is covered with hundreds of little 

 hollow hairs through which is expressed a gummy liquid 

 that turns to silk when it dries. Mrs. Spider slaps her 

 spinnerets broad against the wall and sticks fast I don't 

 know how many hundreds of fine filaments. Then she 

 pulls away the spinnerets and shuts them up, and all 

 those fine filaments melt into one rope, in thickness about 

 one-five-thousandth of an inch. Insects' silk is a simple 

 thread; spiders' is compound, 



