20 BIBD-CATCHING SPIDEE. 



of huge spiders. And now we come to Madame 

 Merian. Here we shall follow that admirable 

 zoologist, W. S. Macleay, who, in his Natural 

 History 1 of Mygale (Trans. Zool. Soc. I.) has de- 

 molished the whole fable. 



After an interval of about forty years, 

 Madame Maria Sibylla Merian, having read 

 that Rochefort's large brown spider catches 

 small birds in its web, or rather, supposing that 

 it caught them, came at once to the conclusion 

 that this entanglement was not without an ulte- 

 rior object. Accordingly, in her work " De 

 Generatione et Metamorphosibus Insectorum 

 Surinamensium," she has most obligingly figured 

 from her imagination an enormous my gale in the 

 very act of ungraciously devouring a Humming- 

 bird. Hence, Linnaeus, trusting to what he 

 deemed good authority, termed this spider (of 

 the generic habits of which he was ignorant) 

 Aranea avicularia the Bird-catching spider. 

 Hence, too, our ignorant book-makers some- 

 times devote a popularly pathetic paragraph and 

 explanatory wood-cut to illustrate the ferocity of 

 this spider-demon! 



Cuvier, in his brief notice of the Humming- 

 birds (E-egne Animal), does not once allude to 

 this subject, but in the fourth volume of the 

 same work, written for him by his Collaborateur, 

 M. Latreille (Ed. 1829), we find at page 247, 

 the following notice, relative to certain species of 

 Epeira. " La toile de quelques especes exotiques 



