voungScicflf- 
SCIENCE 
IS 
KNOWLEDGE. 
KNOWLEDGE 
!S 
POWER. 
A PRACTICAL JOURNAL OF 
HOME ARTS. 
Vol. ni. 
NEW YORK, MAY, 1880. 
No. 5. 
How the Spider Lifted the Mouse. 
NE of the most inter- 
esting books on na- 
tural history is a 
work on " Insect Ar- 
chitecture," byRen- 
nie. But if the ar- 
chitecture of insect 
homes is wonderful, 
the engineering dis- 
played by these crea- 
tures is equally mar- 
vellous. Long before 
man had thought of 
the saw, the saw-fly had used the same 
tool, made after the same fashion, and 
used in the same way for the purpose of 
slitting the branches of trees so that she 
might have a secure place in which to de- 
posit her eggs. The carpenter bee, with 
only the tools which nature has given her, 
cuts a round hole, the full diameter of her 
body, through thick boards, and so makes 
a tunnel by which she can reach a safe re- 
reat in which to rear her young. The tum- 
ble-bug, without derricks or machinery, 
rolls over large masses of dirt many times 
her own weight, and the sexton beetle will, 
in a few hours, bury beneath the ground 
the carcass of a comparatively large ani- 
mal. All these feats require a degree of 
instinct which in a reasoning creature 
would be called engineering skill, and yet 
none of them are as wonderful as the feats 
i:)erformed by the spider. This extraor- 
dinary little animal has the faculty of 
propelling her threads directly against 
the wind, and by means of her slender 
cords she can haul up and suspend bodies 
which are many times her own weight. 
A paragraph has been going the rounds 
of the papers that a spider recently sus- 
pended an unfortunate mouse — raising it 
up from the ground and leaving it to 
perish miserably between heaven and 
earth. Would-be philosophers have made 
great fun of this statement, and ridiculed 
it unmercifully. We know not how true 
it is, but we do know that it may he true. 
Some years ago, in the village of Havana, 
in the centre of this State, a spider en- 
tangled a milk-snake in her threads and 
raised it some distance from the ground, 
and this too in spite of the struggles of 
the animal, which was alive. No doubt 
some wiseacres will deny the possibility 
