We now come to the tragic side of this confusion.  Wishing to have subjects for study within my daily reach and to save myself the trouble of casual excursions, I collect different Epeirae whom I find in the course of my walks and establish them on the shrubs in my enclosure.  In this way, a rosemary-hedge, sheltered from the wind and facing the sun, is turned into a well-stocked menagerie.  I take the Spiders from the paper bags wherein I had put them separately, to carry them, and place them on the leaves, with no further precaution.  It is for them to make themselves at home.  As a rule, they do not budge all day from the place where I put them:  they wait for nightfall before seeking a suitable site whereon to weave a net.

Some among them show less patience.  A little while ago, they possessed a web, between the reeds of a brook or in the holm-oak copses; and now they have none.  They go off in search, to recover their property or seize on some one else’s:  it is all the same to them.  I come upon a Banded Epeira, newly imported, making for the web of a Silky Epeira who has been my guest for some days now.  The owner is at her post, in the centre of the net.  She awaits the stranger with seeming impassiveness.  Then suddenly they grip each other; and a desperate fight begins.  The Silky Epeira is worsted.  The other swathes her in bonds, drags her to the non-limy central floor and, in the calmest fashion, eats her.  The dead Spider is munched for twenty-four hours and drained to the last drop, when the corpse, a wretched, crumpled ball, is at last flung aside.  The web so foully conquered becomes the property of the stranger, who uses it, if it have not suffered too much in the contest.

There is here a shadow of an excuse.  The two Spiders were of different species; and the struggle for life often leads to these exterminations among such as are not akin.  What would happen if the two belonged to the same species?  It is easily seen.  I cannot rely upon spontaneous invasions, which may be rare under normal conditions, and I myself place a Banded Epeira on her kinswoman’s web.  A furious attack is made forthwith.  Victory, after hanging for a moment in the balance, is once again decided in the stranger’s favour.  The vanquished party, this time a sister, is eaten without the slightest scruple.  Her web becomes the property of the victor.

There it is, in all its horror, the right of might:  to eat one’s like and take away their goods.  Man did the same in days of old:  he stripped and ate his fellows.  We continue to rob one another, both as nations and as individuals; but we no longer eat one another:  the custom has grown obsolete since we discovered an acceptable substitute in the mutton-chop.

Let us not, however, blacken the Spider beyond her deserts.  She does not live by warring on her kith and kin; she does not of her own accord attempt the conquest of another’s property.  It needs extraordinary circumstances to rouse her to these villainies.  I take her from her web and place her on another’s.  From that moment, she knows no distinction between meum and tuum:  the thing which the leg touches at once becomes real estate.  And the intruder, if she be the stronger, ends by eating the occupier, a radical means of cutting short disputes.