HARDWICKE'S SCIENCE-GOSSIP. 



73 





A FEW REMARKS ON OUR COMMONEST SPIDERS. 



By K. HURLSTONE JONES. 



BELIEVE that 

 there is no group 

 of animal?, which 

 has been so much 

 neglected by col- 

 lectors and field- 

 naturalists, as that 

 of the spiders. 

 The reason, I be- 

 lieve, is not so 

 much their repul- 

 siveness or com- 

 monness and ap- 

 parent lack of 

 interest, though 

 for my own part I 

 consider them far 

 from repulsive or 

 uninteresting, but 

 the difficulty there 

 is in preserving 

 and storing them when collected. It is my intention 

 here only to set down such things as have come 

 under my own personal notice, therefore I shall be 

 obliged to omit any attempt at a description of the 

 very complicated structure of the spider, external 

 or internal. 



I am certain that very few of my readers are not 

 aware, that the spider is not an insect. However, 

 for the benefit of those who may never have given 

 the point consideration, it may be remarked that a 

 spider is at once distinguished from an insect by the 

 facts that it has eight legs, and that its head and 

 thorax are fused together. There are about five 

 hundred and twenty-five species of spiders at present 

 known in the British Isles, from which it is my 

 intention to pick out some of the commonest, for the 

 purpose of describing their mode of life and habits. 



The first on the list is Agalena labyrinthica. 

 This spider is exceedingly ccmmon on heaths and 

 No. 328. — April 1892. 



commons in the southern counties, out of which I 

 have not yet observed it. The animal is of a greyish 

 brown colour, approaching to a chestnut hue in the fore- 

 part of the body, while the hinder portion or abdomen 

 is crossed transversely by dark bands. It spins a 

 web which in the greater part of its area is fiat, and 

 very closely woven, being suspended from point to 

 point of the heather or ling. But above this, crossing 

 and recrossing in endless confusion are numerous 

 single strands of the spider's silk, not unlike the 

 rigging of a ship, while from one corner of the flat 

 portion of the web, an exceedingly closely woven 

 funnel of silk runs into the heather and down to the 

 ground, in which the spider sits to await its prey, and 

 down which it takes flight when attacked. At first 

 sight it looks as if this funnel were merely a more 

 closely woven portion of the web generally, but 

 my humble opinion is that it is more than this. I 

 observed that on dropping a grasshopper or other 

 fair-sized insect into the web, in any part, no matter 

 how far from the hole, the spider immediately dashed 

 out, and, guided obviously by the vibrations of the . 

 threads, caused by the struggles of his captive, made 

 at once, not to the insect, but close to it ; here he 

 stopped a moment, and feeling with his two front 

 legs, came at once to his prey. I think this pretty 

 effectually proves two facts, first, that these seemingly 

 untidy, aimless webs, are arranged radially ; just as 

 carefully as those of the garden-spiders, which people 

 think so beautiful, and that all the radiating threads, 

 or at any rate the main ones of the web, are concen- 

 trated in the lower half of the network tunnel, to 

 which all vibrations are, so to speak, telegraphed at 

 once from the -most distant part of the web, whither 

 the spider immediately proceeds. The second thing 

 I think proved by this is that a spider has but very 

 limited powers of vision, otherwise it would rely less 

 on its power of appreciating vibrations and more 

 on its power of sight, in the capture of its prey. I 

 made several experiments on the mode in which 



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