(SI ) 
regard himself fortunate if his wife does not eat him up, which 
she sometimes does. In general however she barely tolerates him. 
Some idea of the disparity in size may be had when we learn, 
that if an ordinary man of 150 pounds weight had a wife as much 
larger than himself, as the female of the Ncphila Plumipes , or 
Charleston spider is larger than the male, she would weigh 18,000 
pounds. Idle disparity is not so great as this among all species 
of spiders, but it is a peculiarity among them all. The spider 
can support long fasts and remain torpid during the winter. 
Some of them are very courageous and powerful. In the West 
Indies and South America they have been found with bodies three 
inches long and spanning eight and ten inches with their feet as they 
stand. These spiders when poisonous will kill a large insect by 
a single grapple of the fangs; while the large web builders have 
been known to entangle and kill humming birds and even finches. 
Even in our own fields, spiders are met with which are very 
plucky. They will often face a man, lift the head and jaws, and 
make a decided show of fight. I have seen in Massachusetts 
a grey spider make a stand-up fight when surprised in the grass 
by a mower, and when the scythe was held towards him would 
strike it with his fangs so hard as to make a perceptible ringing 
sound from the metal. 
The remarkable fact about spiders is the arrangement for the 
spinning of silk, out of which they manufacture cocoons for their 
eggs, nests for themselves, and webs for the capture of prey. 
The substance out of which the web is made is a viscid, trans¬ 
parent fluid contained in sacs within the abdomen. From these 
sacs the liquid is conducted to the spinnerets by hundreds of 
minute duels. There are generally three pairs of spinners. The 
spinners as seen under the microscope are obtusely conical pro¬ 
jections, covered with hundreds of minute orifices by which the 
ducts open out to the air. There is some muscular control of 
these spinners, so that they may be slightly turned towards, or 
away from, each other. In the Charleston spider, so called be¬ 
cause first discovered on an island in Charleston harbor during 
o 
the civil war, one pair of spinners produced a beautiful gold col¬ 
ored silk, one pair white, or silver colored and one pale blue ; 
and as the concentric circles of the web of this spider are made 
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