320 THE SPIDERS. 







the pincers and spun them over. The latter business was 

 sometimes done so superficially, when I gave flies very 

 quickly one after the other, that some of the already 

 ensnared flies found time and opportunity to escape. This 

 game was carried on by me for some weeks, as it seemed to 

 me curious. But one day when the spider seemed veiy 

 ravenous, and regularly flew at each fly offered to it, I 

 began teasing it. As soon as it had got hold of the fly I 

 pulled it back again with the pincers. It took this exceed- 

 ingly ill. The first time, as I finally left the fly with it, it 

 managed to forgive me, but when I later took a fly right 

 away, our friendship was destroyed for ever. On the 

 following day it treated my offered flies with contempt and 

 would not move, and on the third day it had disappeared." 



This shoAvs that a spider can be both hurt and 

 offended. And, indeed, its little mind is not incapable of 

 the feeling of revenge. At least in Marquart's " Les 

 faculte's inte'rieures" p. 163, there is a communication from 

 Reklus, according to which a spider inflicted a very 

 poisonous bite on the forehead of a young man, 'who for 

 several days, one after the other, destroyed her web spun 

 each day in a very favorable position over a hole in a 

 roof. 



More certain than this is the remarkable love of spiders 

 for music, which has been established by trustworthy and 

 numerous observations. Spiders living in a room are 

 attracted out by the playing of a piano, guitar, or violin, 

 especially when the music is tender and not too loud. They 

 approach as close as possible to the instrument and to the 

 player, and seem so bewitched by it that they pay no 

 attention to anything else. They are often seen to let 

 themselves down by a thread from the ceiling of the room, 

 so as to get as near as possible to the player. As soon, 

 however, as the music becomes noisy they run back to their 

 nest. Professor C. Reclam ("Body and Mind," 1859, 

 p. 275), at a concert at Leipsic saw a spider which let itself 

 down from one of the chandeliers during the playing of a violin 

 solo, whereas each time that the orchestra broke in it ran 

 swiftly back to its hiding-place. Similar observations have 

 been published by Rabigot, Simonius, von Hartmaun and 

 others. 



Spiders also know how to feign themselves dead, like so 



