218 ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE. 



after this opening was three-quarters completed, and was large 

 enough to let the spider pass out, may have long ago awaked 

 in the brain of some species of spider the idea of making a per- 

 manent and moveable door. But from this to the practical 

 construction of so perfect a door as we have learned to know, 

 and even to the building of the exceedingly complicated nest of 

 the iV. Manderstjernoe, through all the gradations which we 

 already know, and which doubtless exist in far greater number, 

 is no great or impossible step. 



General Intelligence. 



Coming now to the general intelligence of spiders, I 

 think there can be no reasonable doubt, from the force of 

 concurrent testimony, that they are able to distinguish 

 between persons, and approach those whom they have 

 found to be friendly, while shunning strangers. This 

 power of discrimination, it will be remembered, also occurs 

 among bees and wasps, and therefore its presence in 

 spiders is not antecedently improbable. I myself know a 

 lady who has ' tamed ' spiders to recognise her, so that 

 they come out to be fed when she enters the room where 

 they are kept ; and stories of the taming of spiders by 

 prisoners are abundant. The following anecdote recorded 

 by Biichner is in this connection worth quoting : — 



Dr. Moschkau, of Gohlis, near Leipsic, writes as follows to 

 the author, on August 28, 1876 : — 'In Oderwitz (?), where I 

 lived in 1873 and 1874, 1 noticed one day in a half-dark corner 

 of the anteroom a tolerably respectable spider's web, in which 

 a well-fed cross-spider had made its home, and sat at the nest- 

 opening early and late, watching for some flying or creeping 

 food. I was accidentally several times a witness of the craft 

 with which it caught its victim and rendered it harmless, and 

 it soon became a regular duty to carry it flies several times 

 during a day, which I laid down before its door with a pair of 

 pincers. At first this feeding seemed to arouse small confidence, 

 the pincers perhaps being in fault, for it let many of the flies 

 escape again, or only seized them when it knew that they were 

 within reach of its abode. After a while, however, the spider 

 came each time and took the flies out of the pincers and spun 

 them over. The latter business was sometimes done so super- 

 ificially, when I gave flies very quickly one after the other, that 



