122 CHILDHOOD OF ANIMALS 



the body of the mother, and although they are plainly spiders 

 at their first appearance, they go through a number of moults 

 before they are capable of independent life. They are fragile and 

 •delicate little creatures and suffer great destruction from storms of 

 "wind and rain, from drought and floods, and although the numbers 

 produced at a brood are very much reduced from the enormous 

 quantities found among marine animals, they are often large. In 

 some of the spiders belonging to the same group as the garden spider, 

 which spins its huge geometrical snares in autumn, as many as from 

 six hundred to two thousand eggs may be laid by a single female. 

 The numbers are proportioned to the special difficulties to be met, 

 and in some of the spiders that live in the safe retreat afforded by 

 dark caves there may be no more than four or five eggs. 



Maternal care begins before the eggs are laid. Most female 

 spiders spin a little web of silk, deposit the eggs on this and then 

 cover them up with another layer. The egg-bags, or cocoons, 

 are often distinctively shaped and coloured. Those of the large 

 garden spider are globular, bright yellow in colour and almost as 

 wide across as a shilling. Sometimes the cocoons are hidden in a 

 natural shelter, sometimes suspended to the under surface of a 

 leaf, or even hung up in the neighbourhood of the web, and the true 

 cocoons may have woven around them curiously shaped cases of 

 thick resistant silk, which further protects them against the 

 weather. The hunting spiders, which pursue their prey on foot, 

 running swiftly over the ground and springing on insects with 

 great bounds, usually fasten the globular cocoon by a firm thread 

 to the under surface of their body and let it bump along after them. 

 The nests, burrows and other retreats that spiders excavate or 

 spin are usually for their own protection and not specially for the 

 young. But the little English spider that makes a tent-like 

 ■dwelling of soft fluffy threads and is found in almost every bush 

 and shrub in summer, places her green cocoons in her own tent, 

 •and the young when they come out live with the mother for some 

 Weeks. The large water-spider builds a similar dome of silk under 

 water, carries down globules of air entangled in the hairs of the 

 body, and sets them free under the dome until it becomes an anchored 

 diving-bell, within which the eggs are laid and the young hatch 

 and live, until they turn out to make their own retreats. 



When young spiders hatch they are pale in colour, and as 

 they are covered with a thin membrane, can neither spin nor eat. 

 After a few moults they differ from the parents only in size. Until 



