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THE AMERICAN NATURALIST [Vol. XLII 



described this act in much greater detail for various 

 other species, 8 I had called attention to this exclusive 

 use of touch in the courtship and copulation of snare- 

 weavers. The female responds to the male's signals by 

 more gentle and weak pulls when she is eager for him, 

 by stronger and more aggressive ones when she regards 

 him as an object of food; thus there is a language of 

 touch, even at a distance, and the male assures himself, 

 if such an expression is permissible, of the nature of his 

 partner's responses. In the case of marmorea just de- 

 scribed the male took effective means to procure his es- 

 cape should the female prove aggressive, just as did 

 the male of E. diademata observed by Menge: while 

 advancing along her web radius he held an escape line of 

 his own, the outer end of which was attached to the peri- 

 phery of her web ; and when her motions were more vio- 

 lent than usual he loosed his hold on her radius to drop 

 and swing out of her reach on his own escape line. In 

 this way he procured the double advantage of escape and 

 of remaining in communication with her web. 



It may be noted in passing that while in E. marmorea 

 the male seeks only adult females, in Theridium tepidar- 

 iorum the males mature somewhat earlier than the fe- 

 males and are to be found upon the webs of the females 

 before the latter have matured. 



We can say that among araneads the sense of touch 

 is the dominant one in those that are snarers. Spiders 

 lack hearing, as seems to be proved by the experiments 

 of my student Miss Pritchett. 9 The long spines placed 

 upon the limbs seem to be tactile and not auditory or- 

 gans. Spiders possess the olfactory sense but it is not 

 known how much they are guided by it. The primary 

 sense of the snarers is touch, and they possess it to a 



' I'rit.'lim. A. II. observations on Hearing and Smell in Spiders. 

 ^ m{ - These ol.s.-rvn.i-.Hs hnve »„.,.„ criticized by F. Dahl 



