SPIDERS 69 



the different forms of glands and sacks in which the fe- 

 males lay and hatch their eggs as in a nest, and I admired 

 the wonderful manner in which the threads were strongly 

 attached even to smooth glass. But I will not dwell on 

 this longer, nor on the labor and marvelous design of the 

 web, as so many writers have described it admirably, 

 and you yourself have written about it, in one of your 

 erudite " Tuscan Vigils," that is entitled, " Nature, the 

 Geometrician." Moufet asserts that there are often as 

 many as three hundred eggs in those nests, and I have 

 counted one hundred and sixty from one insect, which 

 having deposited them all close together, wrapped them 

 with her thread, and built around the ball a larger, white 

 cocoon, in which it was left suspended. As the spider was 

 weaving this covering I noticed that the thread did not 

 come out of her mouth, but out of the end of the abdomen, 

 and I thus verified the statements of ^lianus and Moufet. 

 Pliny wrote that the thread was kept in the uterus: 

 " Orditur telas, tantique operis materiae uterus ipsius 

 sufficit." But Moufet, taking into consideration that the 

 males, which have no uterus, are able to spin as well as 

 the females, does not approve of Pliny's opinion and 

 taxes him with error. This is, however, wrong, because 

 the word " uterus " used in this occasion by the great 

 writer is adopted by the Latin authors not only in the 

 sense of womb, but also in that of abdomen, as, according 

 to Isidorous 2nd. ist., " Uterum solae mulieres habent, 

 auctores tamen uterum pro utriusque sexus ventre po- 

 nunt." Therefore, Pliny did not err when he wrote: 

 " orditur telas . . . etc.," but Aristotle erred greatly 

 in contradicting wise Democritus, writing in the ninth 

 book of his " History of Animals," that spiders do not ex- 

 tract their thread from the interior of the abdomen, but 



