No. 2.] MEiYTAL POWERS OF SPIDERS. 413 



being shaken he suspended himself from a fold of the cloth, 

 remaining quiet at first two minutes, and after a second shake, 

 three hours and a quarter. When touched he ran away. Here 

 we have an instance of one of our best feigners keeping quiet 

 for hours while holding on to a line by a muscular effort. 



In two of these experiments it seemed probable that the 

 spider was unable to retrace its way to the web. This suggested 

 the idea that the habit of keeping still after dropping must not 

 only help a spider to avoid detection, but must also make it 

 more certain of finding its way home after the danger is over. 

 There would thus be a double advantage in absolute quiet. 



It must be remembered that as a spider drops, it spins a line 

 of web which forms a straight path backward to the starting- 

 point ; but as soon as the spider moves, the line adheres first to 

 one twig or blade of grass and then to another, and its way home 

 is thus rendered indirect. 



Bearing this point in mind in our subsequent observations we 

 were soon convinced that if a spider kept quiet after dropping, 

 it could easily return to the web by means of its line ; whereas, if 

 it moved only a very little, it became confused and either lost its 

 web entirely or only regained it after a lengthy search. 



For example, we found, one evening, a female labyrinthea 

 spinning her web in a cedar-tree, and made her drop by bring- 

 ing a vibrating fork near her. She paused on a branch two feet 

 below the web, and remained quiet for four minutes ; she then 

 changed her position, moving about half an inch. After this 

 she was perfectly still for twenty minutes. At the end of that 

 time she began to climb up and down over the branches, with 

 her first legs extended, apparently hunting for the line leading 

 to her web. She occasionally swung off from a branch for a 

 little way, and then returned to it. After forty-five minutes she 

 seemed to become discouraged, and crouched down on a twig, 

 where she remained for over an hour, when she was replaced in 

 the web, and immediately went to work to complete it. 



We made another female of this species drop from her partly 

 completed web. She. stopped on a branch, and, after keeping 

 perfectly quiet for one minute, changed her position (probably 

 to one of greater comfort), moving about a quarter of an inch. 

 After keeping still for five minutes more, she started to go back 

 to her web ; but it soon became evident that she had lost her 



