HOUSE AND GARDEN 
March, 1912 
Another club which had its grass courts 
laid out with a dense growth of trees a 
few yards back from the courts on the 
east side finally came to the conclusion 
that they either had to rearrange the courts 
or chop down some of the trees. The 
morning shade of the trees kept the courts 
from drying up quickly so often that the 
players got disgusted. Beautiful morn¬ 
ings after a rainstorm would dawn, and 
the players would anticipate fine after¬ 
noons of tennis. But the courts were too 
wet until very late in the day. 
Like everything else, there is a right and 
wrong way of laying out courts, and if one 
is doing it as a permanent fixture of the 
garden a little care and attention to these 
details will add a hundred per cent, to 
their value and increase the comfort of 
players and spectators. 
The Mathematical Spider 
(Continued from page 19) 
Edwards took time enough from his 
gloomy philosophical writings to notice 
how spiders did this to get from place to 
place. It is not an unusual thing, espe¬ 
cially on October evenings, to see spiders 
relying upon the air to carry them from 
place to place. They climb up to the top 
of a fence post and uptilting the abdomen 
exude the thread liquid from their spin¬ 
nerets usually in one or two fine threads. 
As the breeze pulls these out to greater 
length they have the buoyant effect of a 
balloon and soon the spider, gauging this 
carrying power, lets go of the post, reaches 
up and grasps the filaments in his claws 
and goes sailing off in the air as some ex¬ 
perienced aeronaut. 
With his web constructed, the spider 
sets about getting his prey, and it is not 
simply a matter of waiting until an insect 
becomes entangled. In the vertical web 
one commonly sees the animal head down¬ 
ward, seated at the hub of the web and 
grasping a radiating line in the claws of 
each of his eight legs. In this position the 
slightest touch is telegraphed him, and he 
can immediately tell from the vibration 
where the insect is struggling. When 
anything does touch the net the spider is 
seen to twitch with a great muscular ex¬ 
ertion, and appears to be jerking the lines 
and making the web vibrate. Superficial¬ 
ly it would appear that the purpose of this 
was to involve the victim still more in the 
meshes of the web. Later investigation, 
however, has gone toward proving that the 
spider tells the nature of the disturbance 
by these motions. If a stick or twig fall 
in the net, the spider will noti-'e at once 
that there is no answering activity to his 
jerk, and will proceed according to his 
perception that the disturbance is caused 
by something that is not prey. When, 
however, the jerks on his line advise him 
that a quarry is snared, he leaves his posi¬ 
tion at the hub. often carrying a drag line 
from its central point, and proceeds, some- 
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