COCOON LIFE AND BABYHOOD. 



times its own length, and know liow to make a perfect miniature of the 

 nests of its parents, seems to be a fact which has scarcely a parallel in 

 Nature. (See Fig. 2(>r>.) 



When we remember how difficult a thing it is for even a trained 

 draughtsman to reduce by eye a complicated drawing or model to a greatly 

 diminished scale, we must own that 

 the performance of this feat by a baby 

 spider is so surprising as almost to 

 exceed belief. And yet even the most 

 complicated form of trapdoor nest, 

 namely, that of the branched double 

 door type, is perfectly reproduced in 

 miniature by these tiny architects, 

 with the upper door, the lower door, 

 the main tube, and the branched 

 body accurately placed. 1 



Mr. A. R. Wallace shows that there 

 is some reason to doubt whether birds, 

 which are so frequently said to build 

 by instinct, would construct the nest 

 proper to their kind if they were sep- 

 arated from the mother at the earliest 

 age and reared apart from her or oth- 

 ers of her kind. He states that birds 

 brought up from the egg in cages do 

 not build the proper specific nest; nor 

 do they even sing their parent's song 

 without being taught. 2 Whatever may 

 be the case with birds or other highly 

 organized animals, there is not the 

 slightest reason to doubt that, with 

 spiders, all forms of nests are built 

 in the most perfect condition by the 

 young as soon as they are able to do 

 any work at all after being hatched 

 from the eggs. There is no fact which 

 I have more frequently observed and Flo> 286 - The spinningwork commons of a brood of 



young Agalenas, made in confinement. 



demonstrated than that all the inter- 

 esting habits of spiders, including those which would appear to require the 

 greatest reasoning powers, or the exercise of faculties that in highly or- 

 ganized animals would imply the possession of experience and cunning 



1 Trapdoor Spiders, page 127. See Fig. b, plate ix., page 98. 



2 Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection. 



