SPIDERS AND THEIR WEBS. 



611 



however, is the physical condition of spiders, who would long since have been extir- 

 pated, if nature had not provided them with the power of secreting two liquids, the 

 one a venom ejected by their mandibles, the other of a glutinous nature, transuded by 

 papillae at the end of their abdomen. These two liquids amply supply the want of 

 all other weapons of attack or defence, and enable them to hold their own against a 

 host of enemies. With the former they instantly paralyze insects much stronger and 

 much more formidable in appearance than themselves ; while with the latter they spin 

 those threads which serve them in so many ways, to weave their wonderful webs, to 

 traverse the air, to mount vertically, to drop uninjured, to construct the hard cocoons 

 intended to protect their eggs against their numberless enemies, or to produce the soft 

 down which is to preserve them from the cold. 



Preying on other insect tribes, which they attack with the ferocity of the tiger, or 

 await in their snares with the patient artifice of the lynx, the spiders may naturally be 

 expected to be most numerous in the torrid zone, where nature has provided them 

 with the greatest abundance of food. There also, where so many beetles, flies, and 

 moths attain a size unknown in temperate regions, we find the spiders growing to sim- 

 ilar gigantic dimensions, and forming webs proportioned to the bulk of the victims 

 which they are intended to ensnare. 



By means their monstrous webs many giant-spiders of the tropical zone are en- 

 abled to entangle not only the largest butterflies and moths, but even small birds. 

 Tremeyer tells us that there are spiders in Mexico which extend such strong nets 

 across the pathways, that they strike off the hat of the passer by ; and at Goree and 

 in Senegal several spiders spin threads so strong as to be able to bear a weight of sev- 

 eral ounces, and which no doubt would be made use of for twine, if the negroes did 

 not already possess vegetable fibres in abundance fit for the purpose. In the for- 

 ests of Java, Sir George Staunton saw spider webs of so strong a texture that it re- 

 quired a sharp knife to cut one's way through them ; and many other similar examples 

 might be mentioned. These, large spiders so temptingly suspended in mid-air in the 

 forest-glades, seem very much exposed to the attacks of birds, but in many cases it 

 has pleased nature to invest them with large angular spines sticking out of their bodies 

 in every kind of fashion. Some are so protected by these long prickles that their 

 bodies resemble a miniature " chevaux-de-frise," and could not by any possibility be 

 swallowed by a bird without producing a very unpleasant sensation in his throat. One 

 very remr.rkable species ( Gasteracantha arcuata) has two enormous recurved conical 

 spines, proceeding upwards from the posterior part of the body, and several times 

 longer than the entire spider. 



Other araneae, to whom these means of defence have been denied, are enabled by 

 their color to escape the attacks of many enemies, or to deceive the vigilance of many 

 of their victims. Thus, those that spend their lives among the flowers and foliage of 

 the trees are, in general, delicately and beautifully marked with green, orange, black, 

 and yellow, while those which frequent gloomy places are clothed with a dark-colored 

 and dingy garb, in accordance with their habits. In the forests about Calderas, in the 

 Philippine Archipelago, Mr. Adams saw handsomely colored species of theridia crouch- 

 ing among the foliage of the trees : while numbers of the same genus of a black color 

 were running actively about among the dry dead leaves that strewed the ground, 

 looking, at a little distance, like odd-shaped ants, and no doubt deceiving many an 



