CONCLUSION. 229 



for this confusion, falls into it himself. He tells liow, when a 

 boy, he made some observations upon a garden spider. 



He says: "I had made myself, as a boy, a fly-trap, like a 

 pigeon-cote. The flies were attracted by scattered sugar, and 

 caught as soon as they entered the cage. Behind the trap was 

 a second box, separated from it by a sliding door, which could 

 be opened or shut at pleasure. In this I had put a large garden 

 spider. Cage and box were provided with glass windows on 

 the top, so that I could quite well observe anything that was 

 going on inside. At first nothing particular happened. When 

 some flies had been caught and the slide was drawn out the 

 spider, of course, rushed upon her prey and devoured them, 

 leaving only the legs, head, and wings. That went on for some 

 time. The spider was sometimes let into the cage, sometimes 

 confined to her own box. But one day I made a notable dis- 

 covery. During an absence the slide had been accidently left 

 open for some little while. When I came to shut it, I found 

 that there was an unusual resistance. As I looked more closely, 

 I saw that the spider had drawn a large number of thick 

 threads directly under the lifted door, and that these were pre- 

 venting my closing it, as though they had been so many cords 

 tied across it. 



''What was going on in the spider's mind before she took this 

 step towards self-preservation — a step, mark you, which but for 

 the vis major of the boy-master would have been perfectly ad- 

 equate to effect the desired result? The animal psychologist 

 will possibly say: 'The spider must first of all have come to 

 understand the mechanism of the sliding-door, and must have 

 said to hereelf that a force operating in a definite direction could 

 be compensated by another in the opposite direction. Then 

 she set to work, relying upon the perfectly correct inference 

 that if she could only make movement of the door impossible, 

 she would always have access to the victims of her murderous 

 desires. There you have a consideration of general issues, an 

 accurate prevision, and a cautious balancing of cause and effect, 

 end and means.' Well, I am rather inclined to explain the mat- 



