threshold, which she did not think it opportune to cross.  Her patience outlasted mine.  In that case, I employed the following tactics:  after making sure of the Lycosa’s position and the direction of the tunnel, I drove a knife into it on the slant, so as to take the animal in the rear and cut off its retreat by stopping up the burrow.  I seldom failed in my attempt, especially in soil that was not stony.  In these critical circumstances, either the Tarantula took fright and deserted her lair for the open, or else she stubbornly remained with her back to the blade.  I would then give a sudden jerk to the knife, which flung both the earth and the Lycosa to a distance, enabling me to capture her.  By employing this hunting-method, I sometimes caught as many as fifteen Tarantulae within the space of an hour.

’In a few cases, in which the Tarantula was under no misapprehension as to the trap which I was setting for her, I was not a little surprised, when I pushed the stalk far enough down to twist it round her hiding-place, to see her play with the spikelet more or less contemptuously and push it away with her legs, without troubling to retreat to the back of her lair.

   ’The Apulian peasants, according to Baglivi’s {4} account, also hunt
   the Tarantula by imitating the humming of an insect with an oat-stalk
   at the entrance to her burrow.  I quote the passage: 

’"Ruricolae nostri quando eas captare volunt, ad illorum latibula accedunt, tenuisque avenacae fistulae sonum, apum murmuri non absimilem, modulantur.  Quo audito, ferox exit Tarentula ut muscas vel alia hujus modi insecta, quorum murmur esse putat, captat; captatur tamen ista a rustico insidiatore.” {5}

’The Tarantula, so dreadful at first sight, especially when we are filled with the idea that her bite is dangerous, so fierce in appearance, is nevertheless quite easy to tame, as I have often found by experiment.

’On the 7th of May 1812, while at Valencia, in Spain, I caught a fair- sized male Tarantula, without hurting him, and imprisoned him in a glass jar, with a paper cover in which I cut a trap-door.  At the bottom of the jar I put a paper bag, to serve as his habitual residence.  I placed the jar on a table in my bedroom, so as to have him under frequent observation.  He soon grew accustomed to captivity and ended by becoming so familiar that he would come and take from my fingers the live Fly which I gave him.  After killing his victim with the fangs of his mandibles, he was not satisfied, like most Spiders, to suck her head:  he chewed her whole body, shoving it piecemeal into his mouth with his palpi, after which he threw up the masticated teguments and swept them away from his lodging.

’Having finished his meal, he nearly always made his toilet, which consisted in brushing his palpi and mandibles, both inside and out, with