120 EIGHT-LEGGED FRIENDS. 



which have actually to be spun out of the assimilated 

 food-stuffs in her own body ; to say nothing of the 

 additional necessity imposed upon her by nature for 

 laying a trifle of six or seven hundred eggs in a single 

 summer. And, to tell the truth, Lucy and Eliza seemed 

 to us to be always eating. No matter at what hour 

 one looked in upon them, they were pretty constantly 

 engaged in devouring some inoffensive fly, or weaving 

 hateful labyrinths of hasty cord round some fiercely- 

 struggling wasp or some unhappy beetle. 



We weren't fortunate enough, I regret to say, to see 

 Eliza's eggs hatch out from the cocoon; but in other 

 instances, especially in Southern Europe, I have noticed 

 the little heap of well-covered ova, glued together into a 

 mass, and attached to a branch or twig by stout silken 

 cables. If you open the cocoon when the young spiders 

 are just hatched, they begin to run about in the most 

 lively fashion, and look like a living and moving congeries 

 of little balls or seedlets. The common garden spider 

 lays some seven hundred or more such eggs at a sitting, 

 and out of those seven hundred only two on an average 

 reach maturity and once more propagate their kind. 

 For if only four lived and throve, then clearly, in the 

 next generation, there would be twice as many spiders as 

 in this ; and in the generation after that again, four 

 times as many; and then eight times; and so on ad 

 infinitum, until the whole world was just one living and 

 seething mass of common garden spiders. 



What keeps them down, then, in the end to their 

 average number? What prevents the development of 

 the whole seven hundred ? The simple answer is, con- 



