Let us give another the choice between the imitation and the real.  The rightful pill and the cork ball are placed together on the floor of the jar.  Will the Spider be able to know the one that belongs to her?  The fool is incapable of doing so.  She makes a wild rush and seizes haphazard at one time her property, at another my sham product.  Whatever is first touched becomes a good capture and is forthwith hung up.

If I increase the number of cork balls, if I put in four or five of them, with the real pill among them, it is seldom that the Lycosa recovers her own property.  Attempts at enquiry, attempts at selection there are none.  Whatever she snaps up at random she sticks to, be it good or bad.  As there are more of the sham pills of cork, these are the most often seized by the Spider.

This obtuseness baffles me.  Can the animal be deceived by the soft contact of the cork?  I replace the cork balls by pellets of cotton or paper, kept in their round shape with a few bands of thread.  Both are very readily accepted instead of the real bag that has been removed.

Can the illusion be due to the colouring, which is light in the cork and not unlike the tint of the silk globe when soiled with a little earth, while it is white in the paper and the cotton, when it is identical with that of the original pill?  I give the Lycosa, in exchange for her work, a pellet of silk thread, chosen of a fine red, the brightest of all colours.  The uncommon pill is as readily accepted and as jealously guarded as the others.

We will leave the wallet-bearer alone; we know all that we want to know about her poverty of intellect.  Let us wait for the hatching, which takes place in the first fortnight in September.  As they come out of the pill, the youngsters, to the number of about a couple of hundred, clamber on the Spider’s back and there sit motionless, jammed close together, forming a sort of bark of mingled legs and paunches.  The mother is unrecognizable under this live mantilla.  When the hatching is over, the wallet is loosened from the spinnerets and cast aside as a worthless rag.

The little ones are very good:  none stirs none tries to get more room for himself at his neighbours’ expense.  What are they doing there, so quietly?  They allow themselves to be carted about, like the young of the Opossum.  Whether she sit in long meditation at the bottom of her den, or come to the orifice, in mild weather, to bask in the sun, the Lycosa never throws off her great-coat of swarming youngsters until the fine season comes.

If, in the middle of winter, in January or February, I happen, out in the fields, to ransack the Spider’s dwelling, after the rain, snow and frost have battered it and, as a rule, dismantled the bastion at the entrance, I always find her at home, still full of vigour, still carrying her family.  This vehicular upbringing lasts five or six months at least, without interruption.  The celebrated American carrier, the Opossum, who emancipates her offspring after a few weeks’ carting, cuts a poor figure beside the Lycosa.