What a wonderful silk-factory it is!  With a very simple and never-varying plant, consisting of the hind-legs and the spinnerets, it produces, by turns, rope-maker’s, spinner’s, weaver’s, ribbon-maker’s and fuller’s work.  How does the Spider direct an establishment of this kind?  How does she obtain, at will, skeins of diverse hues and grades?  How does she turn them out, first in this fashion, then in that?  I see the results, but I do not understand the machinery and still less the process.  It beats me altogether.

The Spider also sometimes loses her head in her difficult trade, when some trouble disturbs the peace of her nocturnal labours.  I do not provoke this trouble myself, for I am not present at those unseasonable hours.  It is simply due to the conditions prevailing in my menagerie.

In their natural state, the Epeirae settle separately, at long distances from one another.  Each has her own hunting-grounds, where there is no reason to fear the competition that would result from the close proximity of the nets.  In my cages, on the other hand, there is cohabitation.  In order to save space, I lodge two or three Epeirae in the same cage.  My easy-going captives live together in peace.  There is no strife between them, no encroaching on the neighbour’s property.  Each of them weaves herself a rudimentary web, as far from the rest as possible, and here, rapt in contemplation, as though indifferent to what the others are doing, she awaits the hop of the Locust.

Nevertheless, these close quarters have their drawbacks when laying-time arrives.  The cords by which the different establishments are hung interlace and criss-cross in a confused network.  When one of them shakes, all the others are more or less affected.  This is enough to distract the layer from her business and to make her do silly things.  Here are two instances.

A bag has been woven during the night.  I find it, when I visit the cage in the morning, hanging from the trellis-work and completed.  It is perfect, as regards structure; it is decorated with the regulation black meridian curves.  There is nothing missing, nothing except the essential thing, the eggs, for which the spinstress has gone to such expense in the matter of silks.  Where are the eggs?  They are not in the bag, which I open and find empty.  They are lying on the ground below, on the sand in the pan, utterly unprotected.

Disturbed at the moment of discharging them, the mother has missed the mouth of the little bag and dropped them on the floor.  Perhaps even, in her excitement, she came down from above and, compelled by the exigencies of the ovaries, laid her eggs on the first support that offered.  No matter:  if her Spider brain contains the least gleam of sense, she must be aware of the disaster and is therefore bound at once to abandon the elaborate manufacture of a now superfluous nest.