264 FOOD OF INSECTS. 



ing it at its exit from the abdomen into such numerous threads. But the 

 chief cause, perhaps, is the occasion (hereafter to be adverted to) which 

 the spider sometimes has to employ its threads in their finer and uncon- 

 nected state before they unite to form a single one. The spider is gifted 

 by her Creator with the power of closing the orifices of the spinners at 

 pleasure, and can thus, in dropping from a height by her line, stop her 

 progress at any point of her descent ; and, according to Lister^, she is also 

 able to retract her threads within the abdomen ; but this is doubted, and 

 with apparent reason, by De Geer.^ 



The only other instruments employed by the spider in weaving are her 

 feet, with the claws of which she usually guides, or keeps separated into 

 two or more, the line from behind ; and in many species these are admi- 

 rably adapted for the purpose, two of them being furnished underneath 

 with teeth like those of a comb, by means of which the threads are kept 

 asunder. But another instrument was wanting. The spider, in ascend- 

 ing the line by which she has dropped herself from an eminence, winds 

 up the superfluous cord into a ball. In performing this the pectinated 

 claws would not have been suitable. She is therefore furnished with 

 a third claw between the other two^, and is thus provided for every 

 occasion. 



The situations in which spiders place their nests are as various as their 

 construction. Some prefer the open air, and suspend them in the midst 

 of shrubs or plants most frequented by flies and other small insects, fixing 

 them in a horizontal, a vertical, or an oblique direction. Others select 

 the corners of windows and of rooms, where prey always abounds ; while 

 many establish themselves in stables and neglected out-houses, and even 

 in cellars and desolate places in which one would scarcely expect a fly to 

 be caught in a month. It is with the operations of these last especially 

 that we are accustomed to associate the ideas of neglect and desertion by 

 man — associations which, both in painting and allegory, have been often 

 happily applied. Hogarth, when he wished to produce a speaking picture 

 of neglected charity, clothed the poor's box in one of his pieces with a 

 spider's net ; and the Jews, in one of the fables with which they have 

 disfigured the records of Holy Writ, have not less ingeniously availed 

 themselves of the same idea. They relate that the reason why Saul did 

 not discover David and his men in the cave of Adullam'* was, that God 

 had sent a spider which had quickly woven a web across the entrance of 

 the cave in which they were concealed ; which being observed by Saul, 

 he thought it useless to investigate further a spot bearing such evident 

 proofs of the absence of any human being.^ 



The most incurious observer must have remarked the great difference 

 which exists in the construction of spidei's' webs. Those which we most 

 commonly see in houses are of a woven texture similar to fine gauze, and 

 are appropriately termed wchs ; while those most frequently met with in 

 the fields are composed of a series of concentric circles united by radii 



* Hist. Anim. An^. p. 8. 



* De Geer, vii. 189. Jlr. Blackwall has explained that this apparent retraction, which is 

 chiefly perceptible in the line forming the concentric circles of the geometric spiders, is an 

 optical illusion, dependini^ on its extreme elasticity, which admits of its being extended 

 several inches and of contracting again into a minute globule. {Zool. Joum. v. 187.) 



» Leeuw. Opusc. iii. 317. f. 1. * 1 Sam. Xiiv. 4. * Lesser, L. ii. 291. 



