Before taking leave of this Spider, let us glance at a curious problem which has already been set by the Lycosa’s offspring.  When carried for seven months on the mother’s back, they keep in training as agile gymnasts without taking any nourishment.  It is a familiar exercise for them, after a fall, which frequently occurs, to scramble up a leg of their mount and nimbly to resume their place in the saddle.  They expend energy without receiving any material sustenance.

The sons of the Clotho, the Labyrinth Spider and many others confront us with the same riddle:  they move, yet do not eat.  At any period of the nursery stage, even in the heart of winter, on the bleak days of January, I tear the pockets of the one and the tabernacle of the other, expecting to find the swarm of youngsters lying in a state of complete inertia, numbed by the cold and by lack of food.  Well, the result is quite different.  The instant their cells are broken open, the anchorites run out and flee in every direction as nimbly as at the best moments of their normal liberty.  It is marvellous to see them scampering about.  No brood of Partridges, stumbled upon by a Dog, scatters more promptly.

Chicks, while still no more than tiny balls of yellow fluff, hasten up at the mother’s call and scurry towards the plate of rice.  Habit has made us indifferent to the spectacle of those pretty little animal machines, which work so nimbly and with such precision; we pay no attention, so simple does it all appear to us.  Science examines and looks at things differently.  She says to herself: 

’Nothing is made with nothing.  The chick feeds itself; it consumes or rather it assimilates and turns the food into heat, which is converted into energy.’

Were any one to tell us of a chick which, for seven or eight months on end, kept itself in condition for running, always fit, always brisk, without taking the least beakful of nourishment from the day when it left the egg, we could find no words strong enough to express our incredulity.  Now this paradox of activity maintained without the stay of food is realized by the Clotho Spider and others.

I believe I have made it sufficiently clear that the young Lycosae take no food as long as they remain with their mother.  Strictly speaking, doubt is just admissible, for observation is needs dumb as to what may happen earlier or later within the mysteries of the burrow.  It seems possible that the repleted mother may there disgorge to her family a mite of the contents of her crop.  To this suggestion the Clotho undertakes to make reply.

Like the Lycosa, she lives with her family; but the Clotho is separated from them by the walls of the cells in which the little ones are hermetically enclosed.  In this condition, the transmission of solid nourishment becomes impossible.  Should any one entertain a theory of nutritive humours cast up by the mother and filtering through the partitions at which the prisoners might come and drink, the Labyrinth Spider would at once dispel the idea.  She dies a few weeks after her young are hatched; and the children, still locked in their satin bed-chamber for the best part of the year, are none the less active.