62 WILDER, TEBMEYEB'S 



were unwashed and as much as three or four after having 

 been washed. 4 



4. As this spider is little known, it will not, I flatter myself, be displeas- 

 ing to the reader, that I should give him an exact idea of it. It is indigenous 

 to almost all South America ; where it is called Abamdui, or Nbamdu-guazu, 

 that is the great spider. In fact from its size it may be called the atlas of spi- 

 ders. Its color is in some gray, and in others dark and black, which colors are 

 probably indications either of age or of sex. Linnaeus found in two of them 

 which he had before him great difference in the size of the thorax, which in one 

 was double that of the other ; but he did not find in their palpi indications of a 

 difference of sex. They are all hairy and bristly. The under part of the 

 head, the palpi, and the tarsi of the legs are of a reddish color. They have 

 at the mouth, two very strong nippers or jaws, curved, black, and of a horny 

 substance. They are furnished with eight eyes, smooth and raised from the 

 head. The thorax is round, blackish before, more convex and margined on 

 the upper part, while in the midst is a disk of long hairs, gathered into little 

 bandies. Less convex is that part behind, in which is seen a deep transverse 

 fissure separating the long hairs ; the abdomen is also hairy and at its extrem- 

 ity are two long appendages. These spiders are two inches and one fifth in 

 length and the thorax is an inch in diameter. They have eight hairy legs, 

 terminating in fleshy pads. I do not know whether this spider belongs to 

 the hunting or to the working spiders, that is whether or not it makes its 

 web in order to take insects, sines I always observed it wandering over 

 the ground or upon the trunks of trees or concealed in the earth. If it does 

 not find insects enough for its food, it boldly attacks humming-birds, small 

 birds a little larger than itself, while they are upon the eggs or upon the young 

 birds in the nests, and if it cannot have the parent birds, it feeds upon the 

 young and upon the eggs. This great spider produces cocoons proportioned 

 to its size, containing thousands of eggs, and places them in the fissures on 

 the trunks of trees. The cocoon is three inches long and one inch and a 

 quarter of a line broad. This extraordinary size of the cocoon has made 

 the inhabitants, who do not observe carefully, imagine that this spider would 

 take the cocoon of the bombice moth del Guyavo (Janus Linn.) and hav- 

 ing destroyed or eaten the chrysalis would place her own eggs there, and 

 then artificially close the hole by which she had penetrated it. The cele- 

 brated Mademoiselle Merian lent credence to this common opinion, but she 

 did not examine the matter, or she would have seen that there were not within 

 any remnants of worm or of chrysalis nor any indications of a hole by 

 which the spider might have penetrated, neither any difference in the silk of 

 which it is composed, a difference inevitable if the spider had supplied with 

 her own that which she had destroyed in opening for herself a wide way into 

 the cocoon of the moth. After Mademoiselle Merian, it did not occur to any 

 other naturalist to doubt that this cocoon was the property of the spider, like 



