THE BANDED EPEIRA 175 



I can see a diaphanous trail of this moisture trickling 

 through the broken ends. Under the pressure of the 

 thin glass slide that covers them on the stage of the 

 microscope, the twists lengthen out, become crinkled rib- 

 bons, traversed from end to end, through the middle, by 

 a dark streak, which is the empty container. 



The fluid contents must ooze slowly through the side 

 of those tubular threads, rolled into twisted strings, and 

 thus render the network sticky. It is sticky, in fact, and 

 in such a way as to provoke surprise. I bring a fine 

 straw flat down upon three or four rungs of a sector. 

 However gentle the contact, adhesion is at once estab- 

 lished. When I lift the straw, the threads come with it 

 and stretch to twice or three times their length, like a 

 thread of india-rubber. At last, when over-taut, they 

 loosen without breaking and resume their original form. 

 They lengthen by unrolling their twist, they shorten by 

 rolling it again; lastly, they become adhesive by taking 

 the glaze of the gummy moisture wherewith thev are 

 filled. 



In short, the spiral thread is a capillary tube finer than 

 any that our physics will ever know. It is rolled into a 

 twist so as to possess an elasticity that allows it, without 

 breaking, to yield to the tugs of the captured prey; it 

 holds a supply o'f sticky matter in resen^e in its tube, so 

 as to renew the adhesive properties of the surface by 

 incessant exudation, as they become impaired by ex- 

 posure to the air. It is simply marvelous. 



The Epeira hunts not with springs, but with lime- 

 snares. And such lime-snares ! Everything is caught in 



