ESSAYS 323 



imperturbable, the two spiders sharing the one fly, for two hours. Arachnological 

 conjugal bliss ! 



There is, in fact, more in the common occurrence of a spider's eating a fly 

 than might appear. Fabre, in his description of the Labyrinth Spider, states 

 that when he fed it with Locusts, the spider sucked the " haunches " of its prey, 

 and left untouched the bulk of its body. It has been, therefore, the more 

 interesting to observe the House Spider, T. atrica, after throwing away the dry 

 exoskeleton, and after brushing its cheliceras with its palpi in the way I have 

 described, after this, to observe it pick up severally with its palpi the detached 

 legs that were lying in the tubular part of its web, and to suck them, as if they 

 were, as Fabre suggests, a tit-bit, a dessert after the solid meal. 



The rejected carcase is nearly always dropped into the corner of the cage 

 farthest from where the spider's habitat, the tube, is spun. Mature females, 

 especially, seem to be particular in this respect, and I have seen a little heap of 

 corpses grow in one cornei - , while the rest of the cage was quite clean. It is the 

 same with the faeces ; 80 per cent, of these are dropped right into the far 

 corners and another 15 per cent, or so quite close to the sides, the middle spaces 

 of the floor of the cage and the region near the tube being comparatively clear. 



Not so with the mature male spiders, which, naturally perhaps in their more 

 peripatetic character, do not take so kindly to captivity. Before the final moult, 

 their behaviour is fair : thereafter, no silk is added to their webs, which rapidly 

 fall into ruin, and their cages become generally untidy. A mature male put into 

 a new cage makes either a very poor attempt at a web or none at all. 



One is tempted to include in a third category, the character of the very young 

 spiders. These little creatures require practically a gas-tight cage to meet 

 successfully their migratory instincts and their ability to squeeze themselves 

 through the smallest of cracks. Those that one is able to retain, however, are 

 worth any trouble spent on their cages. The delicate little webs that they spin 

 are almost invisible, yet they will entrap small Calcidce and such insects, which 

 the spiderling, " as brave as a stoat," attacks vigorously. The gnat may be three 

 times as big as the spider, but the latter clings to it so firmly with its chelicerae 

 as to allow itself for a moment to be carried bodily round the cage. It is often a 

 problem to find food for these small spiders, a problem which is only partially 

 solved by the use of the young from the succeeding cocoon ; but I have known 

 them to survive the winter on no more than a few drops of water. They are also 

 extremely partial to a drop of beer ! 



One may note in passing that the form of the cage employed has considerable 

 influence on the behaviour of the spider. A Tegenaria in a plain rectagonal box 

 is not one tithe so comfortable as one in a box with a little shed or shelter in one 

 corner. This corner, slightly the darkest, it employs for the tube of its web. 

 For other genera, it seems to be almost essential to make the general lines of the 

 interior at least slightly resembling the surroundings in which the spider naturally 

 lives. And it is only right, if the habits of the captive spider are to be recorded 

 and assumed similar to those of the free specimens, that this should be done. 



A note on the peculiarities of a captive Pisaura mirabilis, Clerck, appeared in 

 The Field of July last year. This was the first of the Citigradiz that I had 

 succeeded in persuading to live in captivity, and it certainly repaid my trouble. 

 Its most interesting feature was its obvious power of vision, compared with that of 

 spiders of sedentary nature, and again and again I have seen it make a sudden 

 dart on to a fly that walked within some inches in front of it. In fact, it seldom 

 missed anything that once it caught sight of, and although it laid down a number 



