218 
ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE. 
after this opening was three-quarters completed, and was large 
enough to let the spider pass out, may have long ago awaked 
m the brain of some species of spider the idea of making a per- 
manent and moveable door. But from this to the practical 
construction of so perfect a door as we have learned to know, 
and even to the building of the exceedingly complicated nest of 
the N. Manderstjernce , through all the gradations which we 
already know, and which doubtless exist in far greater number, 
is no great or impossible step. 
General Intelligence . 
Coming now to the general intelligence of spiders, I 
think there can be no reasonable doubt, from the force of 
concurrent testimony, that they are able to distinguish 
between persons, and approach those whom they have 
found to be friendly, while shunning strangers. This 
power of discrimination, it will be remembered, also occurs 
among bees and wasps, and therefore its presence in 
spiders is not antecedently improbable. I myself know a 
lady who has 6 tarn d ? spiders to recognise her, so that 
they come out to be fed when she enters the room where 
they are kept ; and stories of the taming of spiders by 
prisoners are abundant. The following anecdote recorded 
by Buchner is in this connection worth quoting : — 
Dr. Moschkau, of G-ohlis, near Leipsic, writes as follows to 
the author, on August 28, 1876 : — ‘In Oderwitz (?), where I 
lived in 1873 and 1874, 1 noticed one day in a half-dark corner 
of the anteroom a tolerably respectable spider’s web, in which 
a well-fed cross-spider had made its home, and sat at the nest- 
opening early and late, watching for some flying or creeping 
food. I was accidentally several times a witness of the craft 
with which it caught its victim and rendered it harmless, and 
it soon became a regular duty to carry it flies several times 
during a day, which I laid down before its door with a pnir of 
pincers. At first this feeding seemed to arouse small confidence, 
the pincers perhaps being in fault, for it let many of the flies 
escape again, or only seized them when it knew that they were 
within reach of its abode. After a while, however, the spider 
came each time and took the flies out of the pincers and spun 
them over. The latter business was sometimes done so super- 
ficially, when I gave flies very quickly one after the other, that 
