THE SNARE OF THE GIANT WOOD SPIDER. 
919 
like a pendulum in the wind. The Nephila is alarmed. She hangs for a while 
to her foundation-line, but at length she recovers and begins to look to her 
snare. Her first act is to gather up the tissue that remains. It is completely 
disordered, massed into a rope, and, of course, beyond any idea of repair. This 
is how the Nephila acts. She climbs down along the sticky rope paying out her 
filament behind. She must descend slowly and with care, for tMs is a viscid 
and a tangled ladder, and it sways in every breeze. At last she reaches the lower 
end, and there, at the extreme foot of the rope, she makes an attachment with 
her spinnerets. Immediately she starts to climb up again, and we now witness 
an occurrence which we have never seen before. We observe that the Nephila 
in her ascent actually pays out no thread. She makes use of the filaments for a 
very different purpose, she literally employs it as a hauling-line by means of 
which she drags up the foot of the rope behind her. When she has hauled it 
up a height equal to about her own length, she makes a second attachment and 
in this way she converts the lower end of the rope into a coil. Now she makes a 
second ascent, hauls up her coil, climbs an equal distance, makes a third attach- 
ment and thus bends another coil. In this manner, by successive stages, she 
continues to make her ascent. She gathers up behind her coil upon coil, and 
finally secures the well-wound rope to hei upper horizontal line. There it hangs 
for a little while waiting for the next step to occur. 
What an excellent and ingenious performance is tliis by wliich the, spider 
gathers up her rope ! As the seaman coils his cable on the ship, so does the 
Nephila wind into a coil the final rope-like fragments of her snare. How 
simple, yet how human like, are the ways of the Nephila and many of the acts 
she does ! It is not alone in the geometrical measurements of her construction, 
but also in the manner that she gathers together the last and tattered fragments 
that re mam. 
We wait for about five minutes when we see the next act begin. The spider 
returns and pays attention to her sticky coils. With her long legs she com- 
pres.ses them into a smaller bulk ; with her palpi she guides the mass into her 
mouth, and takes it between her ponderous jaws. Then, in this attitude, hanging 
by her legs to her foundation -line, she commences to devour her snare. It is Id 
a.m. when the process of mastication begins. She chews at it, she turns it about, 
she moistens it all over with her saliva, and moulds it into a roundish lump. It is 
now a dark yellow globule no larger than her own head ; and the huge sheet, five 
feet in diameter, has beem compressed into a firm ball. Apparently it is no easy 
matter to digest tliis globule of silk. The Nephila is tardy in all her actions, 
but in this she is slow and tedious in the extreme ; the most prolonged of all the 
operations of her life is the mastication of her own snare. I watch her for hours 
with the yellow ball fixed between her patient jaws. She digests it with such 
infinite slowness that it seems scarcely to diminish at all in size. All day long 
I I'eturn at intervals, and I visit her late at night. The globular mass is still 
there ; it has grown much less, but a nodule of half digested substance is still 
fixed between her jaws. I visit her again the next morning. The nodule has 
disappeared. A vast and beautiful sheet is now spread from tree to tree. The 
spider has devoured all her irrevious architecture ; not a particle of it is left, so 
that nothing has gone waste. She has digested it, absorbed it, assimilated it, 
and brought it foiih again. She has converted into her own substance the 
texture which I had destroyed, and has rewoven the fabric anew. 
Another lesson taught by the Nephila is the detailed method by which a spi- 
der overcomes its struggling pre;,. The Araneus will show us the main opera- 
tion, but from the large and leisurely Nephila we can learn some further points. 
The Nephila is in wait at her usual place, in the very centre of the snare. Hei- 
legs are spread out all round about her ; they touch the radii on every side, and 
thus she feels the gentlest quiver in any part of her web. An insect all of a 
sudden falls against the viscid lines. The Nephila is iinmediately on the alert. 
