After this cannibal orgy, does the Lycosa go back home?  Perhaps not, for a while.  Besides, she would have to go out a second time, to manufacture her pill on a level space of sufficient extent.

When the work is done, some of them emancipate themselves, think they will have a look at the country before retiring for good and all.  It is these whom we sometimes meet wandering aimlessly and dragging their bag behind them.  Sooner or later, however, the vagrants return home; and the month of August is not over before a straw rustled in any burrow will bring the mother up, with her wallet slung behind her.  I am able to procure as many as I want and, with them, to indulge in certain experiments of the highest interest.

It is a sight worth seeing, that of the Lycosa dragging her treasure after her, never leaving it, day or night, sleeping or waking, and defending it with a courage that strikes the beholder with awe.  If I try to take the bag from her, she presses it to her breast in despair, hangs on to my pincers, bites them with her poison-fangs.  I can hear the daggers grating on the steel.  No, she would not allow herself to be robbed of the wallet with impunity, if my fingers were not supplied with an implement.

By dint of pulling and shaking the pill with the forceps, I take it from the Lycosa, who protests furiously.  I fling her in exchange a pill taken from another Lycosa.  It is at once seized in the fangs, embraced by the legs and hung on to the spinneret.  Her own or another’s:  it is all one to the Spider, who walks away proudly with the alien wallet.  This was to be expected, in view of the similarity of the pills exchanged.

A test of another kind, with a second subject, renders the mistake more striking.  I substitute, in the place of the lawful bag which I have removed, the work of the Silky Epeira.  The colour and softness of the material are the same in both cases; but the shape is quite different.  The stolen object is a globe; the object presented in exchange is an elliptical conoid studded with angular projections along the edge of the base.  The Spider takes no account of this dissimilarity.  She promptly glues the queer bag to her spinnerets and is as pleased as though she were in possession of her real pill.  My experimental villainies have no other consequences beyond an ephemeral carting.  When hatching-time arrives, early in the case of the Lycosa, late in that of the Epeira, the gulled Spider abandons the strange bag and pays it no further attention.

Let us penetrate yet deeper into the wallet-bearer’s stupidity.  After depriving the Lycosa of her eggs, I throw her a ball of cork, roughly polished with a file and of the same size as the stolen pill.  She accepts the corky substance, so different from the silk purse, without the least demur.  One would have thought that she would recognize her mistake with those eight eyes of hers, which gleam like precious stones.  The silly creature pays no attention.  Lovingly she embraces the cork ball, fondles it with her palpi, fastens it to her spinnerets and thenceforth drags it after her as though she were dragging her own bag.