1924] Some Life History Notes on the Black Widow Spider 165 
mother with all her legs entwined about this little ball, and ask 
him if he can imagine a spider clasping a food morsel in loving 
embrace for long hours at a time in this fashion; then he will 
know whether or not this mother herself knew the difference. 
He will agree with me that in the field of instincts, going in 
quest of food and taking care of the young arouse two distinct 
and remote responses. I therefore maintain that, with certain 
maternal instincts as a foundation, this mother spider, by the 
aid of associated memory, modified or enlarged certain inherent 
capacities to gain certain ends, although I doubt if she would 
have been able to recognize her own cocoon among others. 
During the entire next day, whenever I visited the cage, 
this mother was clinging to her egg-case, and up to the last visit 
the food had not been removed from the webs where I had 
placed it. At dawn of the next day (July 30), I observed that 
the wasp larva was moved nearer to the den and was much 
reduced in size, and so shrivelled that I felt sure that the spider 
had drained its body juices during the night. Strange to relate, 
the cocoon was carried out again during the night, taken from 
the center of the hollow cup and hung in the webs an inch above 
the nest. The Spider seemed, however, to be almost playing 
with the egg-case, for at 10 o’clock the same night when I paid 
her a visit, it was again back in the hollow of her nest. On 
August 1, when it was next observed, the cocoon was again out 
on the open web, two inches above the nest; the next day it was 
still in the same position. On August 4, the fourth egg-case 
had been made; the mother tightly clung to this in the hollow 
of her nest, while the one referred to previously had not been 
moved. 
The third cocoon, the one left outside the den, gave forth 
92 young on August 13, after a period of incubation of 32 days. 
During the night this egg-case had once more been carried away 
and dropped several inches away from the web, but I have no way 
of knowing whether this was done before or after the hatching 
occured. An actual moult occurs in the young spiders before 
they emerge, for on opening a cocoon, one finds in addition to the 
empty egg shells the tiny shedding skins of the spiderlings. 
