EIGHT-LEGGED FRIENDS. 117 



Eliza so bravely and unhesitatingly tackled ; and more 

 than once we caught her in the very act of cutting them 

 out entire, with the whole piece of web in which they 

 were immeshed, and letting them drop on to the ground 

 beneath, merely as a short way of getting rid of them 

 from her premises. I always rather despised Lucy. 

 She hadn't even the one redeeming virtue of most 

 carnivorous or predatory races an insensate and almost 

 automatic courage. 



I need hardly say, however, that the spider does not 

 kill her prey by a mere fair-and- square bite alone. She 

 has recourse to the art of the Palmers and Brinvilliers. 

 All spiders, as far as known, are provided with poison- 

 fangs in the jaws, which sometimes, as in the tarantula 

 and many other large tropical kinds, well known to me 

 in Jamaica and elsewhere, are sufficiently powerful to 

 produce serious effects upon man himself; while even 

 much smaller spiders, like Eliza and Lucy, have poison 

 enough in their falces, as the jawlike organs are called, to 

 kill a good big insect, such as a wasp or a bumble-bee. 

 These channelled poison-glands, combined with their 

 savage tigerlike claws, make the spiders as a group 

 extremely formidable and dominant creatures, the 

 analogues in their own smaller invertebrate world of 

 the serpents and wolves in the vertebrate creation. 



Lucy and Eliza's family relations, I am sorry to say, 

 were not, we found, of a. kind to endear them to a critical 

 public already sufficiently scandalized by their general 

 mode of behaviour to their inoffensive neighbours. As 

 mothers, indeed, gossip itself had not a word of blame to 

 whisper against them ; but as wives, their conduct was 



