UNDER THE MAPLES 



to dig a pit with a surgeon's scalpel." And she 

 carries the soil out in her mandibles, a minute pel- 

 let at a time, and drops it here and there at some 

 distance from her nest. Her dooryard is never 

 littered with it. It takes her one hour to dig a 

 hole the size of half an English walnut, and to 

 remove the earth. 



One afternoon I cut off the doors from two nests 

 and left them turned over, a few inches away. 

 The next morning I found that the occupants of 

 the nests, under cover of the darkness, had each 

 started the construction of a new door, and had 

 it about half finished. It seemed as if the soil 

 on the hinge side had begun to grow, and had put 

 out a semicircular bit of its surface toward the 

 opposite side of the orifice, each new door copying 

 exactly the color of the ground that surrounded it, 

 one gray from dead vegetable matter, the other a 

 light brick-red. I read somewhere of an experi- 

 menter who found a nest on a mossy bit of ground 

 protectively colored in this way. He removed the 

 lid and made the soil bare about. The spider made 

 a new lid and covered it with moss like the old 

 one, and her art had the opposite effect to what it 

 had in the first case. This is typical of the work- 

 ing of the insect mind. It seems to know every- 

 thing, and yet to know nothing, as we use the term 

 "know." 



On the second morning, one of the doors had at- 



138 



