172 
A NATURALIST ON THE PROWL. 
No. 6, and cannot move a limb. In this position she 
leaves it till dinner time. 
I have never been able to satisfy myself whether spiders 
are gifted with much intellect. To be able to sit all day 
doing nothing does not seem to argue an active mind ; 
but yet, when I once enjoyed the privilege of making a 
sea voyage in the company of one of the most renowned 
of Baboo orators, nothing surprised me so much as his 
wonderful power of sitting on deck all day doing nothing 
and staring nowhere, just “ glowrin’ frae him.” I have 
never seen any vertebrate animal that could do the same 
except a cow, and he beat the cow ; for it amuses itself 
chewing the cud, but he did not even chew beetles like 
the Regent of Manipur. I make no doubt that, all the 
while he looked so vacant, he was forging, in the work- 
shop of his brain, those thunderbolts with which he would 
ere long scorch his rash antagonists. 
So may not the spider, in its long hours of seeming 
idleness, be evolving those geometrical figures which excite 
our admiration far less than they should ? This also is 
possible, as Rudyard Kipling has said. But be her 
intellectual endowments great or small, the spider is with- 
out an equal in her own art, and the daily weaving of her 
