64 FLASHLIGHTS ON NATURE 



she can, so as to prevent his furious struggles from 

 unnecessarily destroying her precious web ; then 

 she trundles and bundles him rapidly in a sort of 

 treadmill or merry-go-round, with her front pair 

 of legs ; holds on to the web and steadies her- 

 self with her two middle pairs ; and uses her hind 

 pair, with her comb-like claws, to distribute the 

 silk which she winds in coils about his wings 

 and body. You can see now how useful are her 

 eight legs to her. Each fulfils its own function. 

 In about a minute she has twirled him round and 

 round, and swaddled him firmly in a strong silken 

 covering. I regret to say she does not then pro- 

 ceed to eat him at once, but keeps him imprisoned 

 in torture for an indefinite period, tightly bound 

 in silken cords, till she desires to dine off him. 

 The unhappy fly is bound hand and foot or, 

 rather, wing and leg till it is absolutely incapable 

 of the least resistance ; it is then kept in its close 

 prison with a cruelty more than mediaeval, and 

 at last devoured alive piecemeal by its ruthless 

 captor. The morals of spiders are scarcely better 

 than those of Chinamen. 



Rosalind's changes of costume were also most 

 theatrical and interesting. Like her namesake in 

 the play, she appeared every now and again 

 in a different suit of clothes, and rejected 

 her old ones. The manner of making the 

 new suit, however, and of shuffling off the old, 

 was extremely interesting. She moulted periodi- 

 cally ; but at each moult the whole external 

 skeleton was sloughed off, like a snake's skin 



