BOOK OF MONSTERS

BY
DAVID AND MARIAN FAIRCHILD

PORTRAITS AND BIOGRAPHIES OF A FEW OF THE
INHABITANTS OF WOODLAND AND MEADOW

WASHINGTON
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY
1914

Copyrighted by
National Geographic Society
1914

CONTENTS

BOOK OF MONSTERS

The pictures in this book are portraits of creatures which are as much the real inhabitants of the world as we are, and have all the rights of ownership that we have, but, because their own struggle for existence so often crosses ours, many of them are our enemies. Indeed, man’s own real struggle for the supremacy of the world is his struggle to control these tiny monsters.

The plague of the middle ages, which spread like some mysterious supernatural curse over Europe and carried off millions of people, the yellow fever that has haunted the coasts of South America, the malaria which has strewn the tropics of the world with millions of graves, have been caused by the activities of two of these monsters so universally present in our homes as to have become almost domesticated creatures, the flea and the mosquito. During these last two decades these have come under our control, and the flies which leave a colony of germs at every footstep will not much longer be tolerated, indeed, every creature that bites and sucks our blood or that crawls over our food and dishes has been placed under suspicion.

Man struggles against these tiny monsters not only for his life and health but for his food as well. Almost every cultivated plant has its enemy, and some of them have many. The bugs alone which stick their beaks into all sorts of plants to suck their juices would starve man out in one or two brief seasons if they in turn were not held in check by enemies of their own. The chinch bug alone has demonstrated his power to devastate the wheat fields. The bark beetles that girdle square miles of forest trees, the moths that destroy their foliage, the creatures that burrow into the fruit and fruit trees, the gall-forming flies that form galls on the roots of the grape vines able to destroy the revenues of a whole country, the beetle which strips the potato of its leaves, the one which infects with its dirty jaws the melon vines of the South and turns the melon patches brown—these are a few of the vast array of our enemies. It would require a book much larger than this one just to enumerate those well known.

It should make every American proud to know that it is the American economic entomologist who has, more than any other, pushed his way into this field and shown mankind how to fight these monsters which destroy his food, his animals and himself.

But all these fascinating little creatures are not our enemies. We must not forget that man has domesticated certain of the insects and that gigantic industries depend upon them for their existence.

The honey-bee furnished mankind with sweets during the generations preceding the discovery of the sugar cane, and the silk worm furnishes still the most costly raiment with which we clothe ourselves.

The friends we have in the insect world are those which destroy the pests of our cultivated crops like the Australian lady-bird beetle which has been sent from one country to the other to keep in check the fluted scale which is so injurious to the orange orchards, and the parasites of the gipsy-moth which, in Europe, helps to keep under control this plague of our forest trees, must certainly be counted as our friends.

Also, they are our friends if, like the spiders, they kill such monsters as suck our blood or make our lives unsafe, or, like the great hordes of wasps and hornets, wage unending warfare against the flies but which, because they attack us personally if we come too near their nests, we kill on sight. Strangely enough, it is often these same stinging insects which help us by fertilizing the blossoms of our fruit trees. Indeed many plants are so dependent on these little creatures that they have lost the power of self-fertilizing and thousands of species of trees and plants would become extinct in a generation without their friendly aid.

The ancestors of some of the creatures pictured in this book were buried in the transparent amber of the Baltic many thousands of years ago and the fossil remains of others date back a million years or more, but while man has been developing his surroundings from the primitive ones of savagery to the almost inconceivably complicated ones of civilized life, these creatures, most of them at least, seem to be leading essentially the same kind of lives that they led hundreds of thousands of years ago.

They have powers which neither man nor any other mammal ever dreamed of having.

Some have powers of flight which enable them to sail a thousand miles before the wind. Others can jump a hundred times their own length. One of these monsters can manufacture a liquid rope as easily as mammals produce milk and with it weave aerial nets to trap their prey or, by attaching it, can drop from the dizziest heights without danger, and when the rope has served its purpose they eat it up.

Their weapons of defense are comparable to the deadly ones that only poisonous serpents have. If they were larger they would be, in fact, what legend pictures the dragons to have been.

The unthinkably old germ plasm of these species produces creatures which act with a precision of purpose and a degree of absolute self-sacrifice which cannot fail to stagger the most conscientious of the human race. They might even make one wonder whether the fulfillment of biological life does not consist in sacrifice of the individual for the good of the species to which it belongs.

Certain it is, that human thought is now drifting away from the consideration of the individual and is coming to pay more attention to the species and the things which affect its development. This is a picture book produced in the playtime hours of two busy people. It is a collection of actual photographs of a few of the small-sized monsters which inhabit the tall grass, the flower garden and vegetable garden, the pines and oaks of a place in the woods of Maryland.

If it should show to others a world of new and fascinating things it would be simply doing for them what the taking of the photographs has done for us, opened the door into a realm of real life, of a terrible struggle to live, which is as full of fascination as the dragon tales of old Japan. At the same time, it makes us realize what vast and yet untouched fields of material value lie in the efforts man is making to outwit and circumvent and even, perhaps, to exterminate such of the monsters as encroach upon his own environment.

HOW THE MONSTER PHOTOGRAPHS WERE TAKEN

If you compare these photographs with those to be found in most books on insects, you will find that they differ in several particulars. They are all either front views or side views of the creatures, whereas those in books on entomology are generally views from above. Imagine a book on the horse in which only top views were shown, or a guide to a zoölogical garden illustrated with the various wild beasts photographed from above. It is true that, being an much larger, we generally look down at these monsters, but a mouse also generally runs along the floor or under our feet and yet a zoölogist pictures it from the same point of view that he does an elephant. Crows look down upon us, yet I imagine that no one will admit that the crow’s impression of human beings is as correct or as interesting as that which we have of ourselves. Every creature has a right to be portrayed from its own level, and the reason these photographs are unusual is because they carry out this principle and do each creature justice.

Another particular in which these pictures are new is that, although they represent magnifications of from five to twenty diameters, they are not enlargements from small photographs, but views taken directly from 5 × 7 photographic negatives.

Then too, these creatures have been posed with considerable care in order to give them a lifelike appearance, and this work was done immediately after they had been anesthetized, and in some cases while they were still alive.

The whole art of taking these large photographs of insects is so simple that thousands of amateurs ought to be able to take them.

The outfit consists of the camera, which is just a long box, a long-focus lens, a piece of ground glass and a focusing glass, a flash light, a pair of pincers, some needles mounted in handles or else some small dental tools, a few little blocks of wood, a candle, a piece of glass covered with tissue paper, and a long hollow cylinder made of stiff black paper or cardboard. Add to these a great deal of patience and you have all that is needed.

I made my camera box out of thin quarter-inch whitewood boards and pasted black paper over the joints to keep out the light. Into one end of this box I set the front board with the objective screwed into it. Squaring off the other end of the box, I carefully fitted to it a 5 × 7-inch ground glass holder, exactly the size of an ordinary 5 × 7 plate holder. I framed this in with pieces of wood so that I could slip out the ground glass holder and put a plate holder in its place. For purposes which will be explained later, the ground glass was not fastened into its holder, but a narrow slit through one end of the frame was made just large enough so that it could be slid in or out without taking out the frame itself.

The object to be taken, having been mounted on a little block of wood and fastened there with candle wax, is placed in front of the long focus lens by an assistant, who stands ready to move it back and forth, or sideways, or up and down, according to directions.

Getting to the far end of the camera under the focusing cloth, I begin to hunt for the dim image on the ground glass, and, by directing the assistant to move the object in various ways, am quickly able to bring it into view, but not into sharp focus. In order to do this, I slip the ground glass itself half way out, take up the focusing glass, holding it against the edge of the ground glass in order to steady it. I am thus able to see every detail distinctly without looking through the ground glass at all and can make sure that they are in focus. With the focusing lens, one is able to see the image in the air very plainly, even when the diaphragm is nearly closed and when only the faintest shadow could be seen on the ground glass.

Having made sure that the image covers the plate well and is in good focus, I put in my plate holder, my assistant places the cap over the objective, I draw the slide and walk down to the front of the long camera. Wills, my assistant, then prepares a charge in the Prosch flash lamp and puts the tube of black paper in front of the lens to protect it from the glare of the flash. With one hand I hold up a pane of glass on which thin white paper has been fastened to protect the insect from the direct sunlight; with the other hand I remove the cap of the camera and expose the plate for from 50 to 80 seconds, depending upon the lightness of the object, the brilliancy of the sunlight and the stop employed, 16, 32 or 64. In the meantime, Wills blows off a full charge of magnesium powder in the flash lamp, so holding the lamp that the rays from it will light up the shadows which are underneath the creature’s body. The cap is then put on again and the plate holder closed in the ordinary way. Only the freshest obtainable orthochromatic double-coated plates are used.

The friends who visited us on holidays helped make the long camera, and it was made at three separate times, an eight-foot length at a time. When the creature is very small I use the twenty-four-foot length, but when it is large the twelve or eight-foot one. Each length fits into the one in front of it and is covered with black cloth to make it tight.

The taking of the photographs is not, however, the hardest work of monster photographing, although perhaps the hottest, for in summer it is no joke to swelter under a focusing cloth for half an hour at a time, and the focusing itself is hard on the eyes. It is the mounting of the beasts which wears upon one’s nerves, and here is where the woman’s skill comes, for Mrs. Fairchild learned the art of insect taxidermy and many of the most lifelike photographs in the book were mounted by her.

It has been a source of keen satisfaction to find, upon showing the results to professional entomologists, that many of them did not realize that the insects were not alive when photographed. But, although they were not alive, they had just recently been put to sleep with ether, for we soon discovered that to get a lifelike photograph one must photograph a monster at once, within half an hour after death, the sooner the better.

Many ways of mounting were tried, but none were so successful as the following: Cover the top of a small block of wood with a thin, even coating of paraffin or ordinary candle wax by letting the drippings of the candle fall upon it. Pick a large leaf and turn its upper surface down upon the wax, before it cools, and let it stick there; this will give a natural looking ground for the insect to stand upon. Hold the insect over the block of wood and arrange the legs in as natural a position as you can with a long needle or fine dental tool. Then fasten each foot in place by heating the needle in the candle flame and pricking a hole in the leaf just under each foot so that the wax will come up through the leaf and hold it fast.

This mounting is not so simple as it seems, and, until one has actually experienced it, he can have no idea of the perversity of these six-legged beasts. The way the contracting muscles of a grasshopper’s back legs will pull the other four legs loose, or the way the hornet will refuse to hold its head up, or the way long flexible antennæ will droop are exasperations which lead straight to profanity, unless one is very careful.

The whole thing is a game of quickness, ingenuity and patient skill, for so many things must be watched at once. The wilting insect cannot wait, the sunlight shifts, clouds drift across the sun and then, just as everything is in readiness, a breeze springs up which stirs the creature’s wings and the whole thing has to be given up.

The pioneer in this field of photography is Dr. N. A. Cobb, for it is he who first showed what the face of a fly looks like. His suggestions are what first encouraged me to take up the work, although the method finally used by me is quite different from that which he employed. I substituted the long horizontal camera and the long focus lens for his vertical bellows and short focus lens, believing that for larger creatures I get a greater depth of focus and more lifelike appearance.

After my first mild success, that critical period beyond which so many experiments never go, three friends came to the rescue with their enthusiastic approval and encouragement and I desire that their names be connected with this book which they have helped to make, Mr. and Mrs. Alexander Graham Bell and Mr. Barbour Lathrop.

THE LONG CAMERA WITH WHICH THE MONSTERS WERE TAKEN

The camera, consisting of several long boxes which fit into one another, is stretched on a table made of board and a number of posts set in the ground. At one end is the lens and at the other, the ground glass plate to focus the image on. The monster is mounted on a small wooden block and set up the proper distance in front of the lens. It is moved back and forth in response to directions from the operator, at the other end of the camera, who is watching the image on the ground glass. Lying on the camera above the lens is a black paper cone which, when everything is ready, is put over the lens between it and the monster to prevent the smoke from the flash powder from drifting between the lens and the insect during the exposure. Wills, the assistant, is holding the Prosch magnesium blow lamp, and the insect is shaded from the direct rays of the sun by a large pane of glass covered with a thin sheet of tissue paper. Direct sunlight is reflected from the hairs and polished surfaces of the insects and makes spots on the negative.

SOME OF THE MONSTERS AS THEY APPEAR WHEN MOUNTED ON PINS IN AN INSECT BOX

It has always seemed a pity to me that these beautiful forms of life should be so evanescent. We look at their dried remains in collections and are impressed by their colors and grotesque forms, but we should not forget that after all these are nothing but their dried-up corpses and scarcely more to be compared in real beauty with their living bodies than are the Egyptian mummies comparable to the living faces and forms of the great Pharaohs.

THE MONSTERS PICTURED ON THE SUCCEEDING PAGES,
AND MANY MORE, IMPRISONED IN ONE MUSEUM CASE

They are all pinned in the box and have dried out and changed almost beyond recognition, but the impression which their portraits have made will, I hope, be lasting.

Knowing little about insects I have been dependent upon the kindness of the entomologists of the National Museum, in particular on Dr. L. O. Howard, for the scientific names of the monsters, which names have given me access to what is published about them in the handbooks on entomology.

Practically all of the negatives and prints have been made by Mr. Scott Clime of the Department of Agriculture, who took a particular interest in their preparation.

To Mr. Gilbert H. Grosvenor, Director and Editor of the National Geographic Society, is due the credit of realizing the popular interest these pictures would have and who, in contrast with more timid publishers, reproduced thirty-nine of them in the National Geographic Magazine and urged the preparation of this book.

Chapter I
THE SPIDER WORLD

THE SPIDER WORLD

In enlarging the images of these small spiders to many times their size, one is at once struck by their similarity to crabs and lobsters. Their jointed legs encased in shells, which from time to time they shed, remind one strongly of the crabs, and they do in fact belong to the some great family, the family of arthropods, and they are not insects.

The spider world is the world of eight-legged creatures just as the insect world is the world of the six-legged ones, and educated men and women should no more confuse these great classes of beings than they confuse the bipeds with the quadrupeds.

They differ from the insects in other ways than in the number of their legs—they have no feelers or antennæ, those wonderful sense organs which all insects have, but here and there, especially on the legs, are strange hollow bristles or spines, which end in nerves. Their eyes also are not like insects’ eyes. An insect’s eyes, at least its large prominent ones, are composed of hundreds of lenses or facets, while the spider, though he generally boasts of eight, has only simple ones with single lenses.

Their life is very simple as compared with that of many of the insects. In the fall, the mother spiders lay their eggs in a bag of their own silk, often several hundred eggs being laid in one sac. The spiderlings hatch out in the sac, and, in the North, they spend the long winter there.

They do not have two stages of existence as beetles or butterflies do, but are hatched out mature and equipped with the poison fangs which aid them in their strictly carnivorous, and often even cannibalistic, existence.

They grow and shed their skins as do the baby grasshoppers, but they do not change their form with each moult and none of them have wings.

They have inside their bodies, reservoirs of strange, sticky fluids which they can pour out through spigots in many different ways. This fluid, as it dries, may form drag lines which they trail behind them and fasten as they go to use for safety lines; with some spiders it may even be poured out in such quantities that it makes an aeroplane; with the majority, however, it is used to make their nests or their egg sacs or the marvelously beautiful orbs that prove the graveyards of so many careless insects. For the spiders are the enemies of the insect world; were they more discriminating, they would be perhaps the greatest friends of the human race, but, as they suck all kinds of insects’ blood, all that we can be sure of is that those among them which we find in our houses are a benefit, for there they kill the flies and other insects which we do not want indoors.

To their Southern and especially their tropical cousins, which attack and sometimes kill human beings, this group of fascinating creatures owes the dread in which it is held by people in general. It is a pity, for throughout the Northern states, no dangerous species is known to exist, and those which frequent our houses will no more attack us than do the flies they catch and devour.

Until a child has gazed in wonder at an orb weaver as it spins its web between the trees, or been an eye-witness of the death of some insect unlucky enough to fall into a web, he has not taken his first step toward the wonderland which touches him on every side and he is in grave danger of growing up with a blind side—the side turned toward the field and forest.

There are millions upon millions of spiders, and thousands of species, and they live everywhere from the Arctic Regions to the Tropics. They devour countless myriads of flies and gnats and hosts of other insects, and nobody knows just what good they do us, but every entomologist would hold up his hands in fear at what the result might be should the spiders of the world be blotted out. They must hold countless parasites in check and help to keep the balance even.

If all the little children should learn that they are harmless, I wonder if they could not stop their nurses from killing them. It is the ignorance of those who train our little ones that keeps alive the unreasoning hatred towards so many of the wonder creatures of the woods.

AN EIGHT EYED ENEMY OF THE FLY; A JUMPING SPIDER

(Phidippus audax, Hentz)

We are so accustomed to beasts with two eyes that it is hard to realize that all around us, though hard to see, are little monsters with many eyes of various sizes.

This one has eight eyes, four of which are invisible from the front. The eyes are diurnal, enabling the creature to hunt only by day. Its eight stout legs fit it for jumping forward or sideways with great ease. In comparison with its size, its jumping powers are incredible. If it were the size of a tiger, it would be a beast of prey which could clear a quarter of a mile at a bound.

It can sit on a branch and throw out an elastic dragline behind, strong enough to bear its weight, and by this means it is able to jump at and catch its prey on the fly, regaining its position by climbing up the dragline. Add to this that it possesses a pair of powerful hollow fangs, into which poison sacs empty, and a voraciousness which often leads it into cannibalism, and you have a fair picture of this jumping spider, which is one of a thousand species of little creatures found everywhere except in the polar regions. They range in size from a third to a half an inch long and live under stones and sticks, spending the winter in a silken bag of their own manufacture, but never spinning a web. The males of some species have been observed to dance before the females, holding up their hairy legs above their heads apparently to show off their ornamentation.

READY TO POUNCE ON A FLY ON THE WING; THE JUMPING SPIDER

These is something diabolical in the way these four black eyes in a row stare one out of countenance.

A JUMPING SPIDER READY TO SPRING FROM A LEAF

(Phidippus togatus, Koch.)

I must confess to a peculiar feeling of embarrassment, almost of fear, towards a jumping spider. It stares at you so intently and seems no fearless as it wheels to keep you covered with its battery of eyes; and you never know which way it is going to jump.

THE WOLF-SPIDER

(Lycosa carolinensis, Walck.)

This is not the photograph of a polar bear, but that of a wolf-spider, with a battery of eight eyes on the top of its head and poison fangs hanging below.

Some such impression as this, I imagine, must be made on the retina of a fly or beetle when, in wandering through the grass at dusk, it suddenly finds itself face to face with a wolf-spider sitting on the turret which forms the entrance to its web-lined hole in the ground.

Behind and above the fangs and hidden in their shadow is the creature’s mouth, toothless and made for sucking only. With his fangs, this wolf-spider kills and crushes his victim; then he sucks the body dry and throws away the carcass.

Seen here and there above the body hairs are black spines, hollow inside and connected with the nerves of touch. Of his eyes, the two in the center in front are supposed to be for use by day, while all the others are nocturnal, enabling him to stalk his prey at dusk. It is the wolf-spider that often appears at night within the circle of lamplight searching for nocturnal insects.

The nocturnal eyes are remarkable organs, with reflecting structures so placed behind the retina that the light entering the eye traverses the retina twice, and it is supposed that this reflecting structure increases the effect of any faint light, enabling the creature to “see in the dark.”

This is a hunting spider, chasing its prey through the grass or lurking under stones, especially in damp places.

It does not spin a web, but lives in a silk-lined hole six or eight inches deep, which it digs in the ground, and around the entrance to which, out of sticks and grass, it builds a turret or watch-tower, from which it can see its prey more readily than from the ground. These spider holes are common in the meadows of Maryland.

In form and color the wolf-spider resembles the famous tarantula of southern Europe, the bite of which was supposed to cause the tarantella, or dancing madness; but it is as harmless as a butterfly, and indeed, Doctor Comstock, who is the authority on spiders, believes that no spiders in the Northern states are poisonous to man.

THE CAST OFF OUTER SKELETON OF A WOLF-SPIDER

(Lycosa punctulata, Hentz)

This photograph is of the outer skeleton or shell of a small wolf-spider which I found clinging to the focusing cloth of my camera after it had been lying on the grass.

With us the bony skeleton is internal and grows as we grow. With spiders the skeleton is a tough, leathery structure, which cannot change; so that the young, rapidly growing spider soon finds his shell too tight for him, and, like a crab, he bursts his shell and pulls his soft body from each leg and complicated cavity.

This process seems marvelous, but is really comparatively simple when we realize that before the old shell is cast off it is loosened from the new skin by the moulting fluid which is excreted from glands opening through this new skin.

After the old skin is loosened it splits along the sides of the body and in front of the eyes, the slit being just above the legs and jaws, and that portion of the old skeleton which had covered the back is lifted off like a lid. The new skin, at first elastic enough to accommodate the increased size of the body, soon becomes hardened like the old, and must in its turn be shed.

Imagine, if you can, the surprise of a wolf-spider who, in running through the grass, should stumble over his own outgrown skeleton, so like his former self in all its details that he could scarcely fail to recognize it as his own; for even the transparent cornea of the eye is a part of this outer skeleton and is shed with it, as well as the jaws, sensitive spines, and hairs.

THE SPINY-BELLIED SPIDER WHICH BUILDS NETS ACROSS THE PATH

(Acrosoma gracile, Walck.)

We are accustomed to the dromedary’s hump and the kangaroo’s big tail, but had this creature been as big as either, or were we Lilliputians, its black and white spiny body, shaped at the bottom like an umbrella stand, would attract more attention at the zoo than either of those desert beasts.

Its eight long, crab-like legs are made for spinning, and across the openings in the forest it stretches a great net in which to snare its game. On this it sits protected from the birds to whose eyes it looks from above like some bird’s droppings in the web. This one is a female and its mate is said to be much smaller and quite different, with no humps or spines at all and a long narrow body.

The courtship of spiders is often a dangerous business for the male, and perhaps it is quite as well for him that he is often smaller and more agile than his mate, for if the female is not ready to receive his advances, she is apt to pounce upon him and destroy him.

THE BIRD-DROPPING SPIDER, A CREATURE WITH PROTECTIVE COLORING

(Epeira verrucosa, Hentz)

This orb weaver had swung its net across a wood road, and so perfectly did the white patch on its back resemble a bird’s dropping that until my hand touched the net I failed to realize that a living thing was hanging there. There is something strangely fascinating about the compelling force of instinct: a spider hatched in captivity who has never seen a web made, will weave its own in the same delicate and intricate pattern that its mother made, using the different kinds of rope correctly, and spacing each strand with a mathematical precision. Indeed, the web of this untutored little spiderling will be as characteristic of its species as the white spot upon its back. It would be as though a child, cast alone on a desert island, should build a house in all details precisely like its ancestral home.

THE AERIAL TRAPPER: THE ORB-WEAVING SPIDER

(Epeira trivittata, Keys.)

Hidden behind these eight four-jointed legs of varying lengths, covered with hollow, sensitive bristles, is the spider’s head, with eight eyes, strong jaws, poison fangs, and a pair of palpi, which look like extremely short legs and seem to serve as hands. The hairy body is filled with thousands of eggs and contains also a marvelous reservoir of liquid rope opening into spinnerets on the under side of the body. Some of the tubes or spinnerets make strong and dry filaments and others make sticky ones. The radiating threads of the spider’s web, those which compose the framework, are stiff and dry; the spiral threads, however, which join them together, are coated with a substance which no little flying creature can strike against without running the risk of sticking fast.

Before you are up on a summer’s morning this wonderful creature will have manufactured what would be equivalent to two miles of elastic and sticky rope if she were as large as a six-foot man. With the skill of an experienced fish-net maker, she will, in a few hours, construct a net as large as a cartwheel, which like the whale-nets of New Zealand, though they may break with the floundering of the prey, bewilder it and tire it out with struggling.

The orb-weaver is the aerial trapper among living creatures, stretching its sticky, elastic web across the aerial runway of its prey and waiting with a patience which would drive a fisherman insane.

To insects of its own size, the orb-weaver is a hideous, bloodthirsty monster. It sinks its fangs into its struggling prey, injects a poison quite as deadly as that of the rattlesnake, and quickly sucks the blood of its victim.

ORB-WEAVER FILLED WITH A THOUSAND EGGS WHICH SHE LAYS ALL AT ONCE

(Epeira domiciliorum, Hentz)

Atlas with the world on his back, as imagined by the boys of Athens, could not have been more strange than this creature with her distended yellow body.

Some of her kin have fasting powers almost beyond belief; they have been kept alive in captivity for eighteen months without food.

This species is one of the commonest orb-weavers on the American continent, and its webs, like great cartwheels, are to be found across the pathways in the woods and everywhere in clearings in the wood-lot.

She is a tight-rope performer her whole life long and her long, muscular legs seem well fitted to enable her to hang, week after week, from her web, supporting in her much enlarged body a thousand or so eggs, which she will later lay, not one at a time, but all at once. No surprise is sudden enough to catch her unprepared and make her fall from the dizzy heights where she lives, without first being able to attach an anchor line. This she does by rubbing her spinnerets over the surface on which she stands, and by quickly spreading and bringing them together again she makes an attachment disc from which she can reel out her rope and check her fall.

The gift of spinning from internal reservoirs, supplied by active secreting cells, is common in the insect world as well as in the world of spiders, for thousands of species of caterpillars make cocoons of silk which they spin as rapidly as any spider makes its web. I doubt if any silk-gowned lady ever stops to think how many thousand gorgeous moths have been cut short in their careers in order that the threads which the silkworms have thrown around them to make a nest in which to pupate could be reeled off to make the silken stuff she wears.

A SPIDER FROM A FLY’S POINT OF VIEW

(Dolomedes tenebrosus, Hentz)

A spider from the fly’s point of view is a terrible monster, indeed. Its claws of polished chitin, sharp as sword points, each with an aperture leading to a sac filled with deadly poison, its array of eyes of different sizes, its mottled, hairy skin covered with hollow sensitive bristles, and its powerful, leg-like palpi must strike terror to the heart of any fly or cockroach which may happen in its neighborhood.

Civilized man rarely sees the ferocity of wild beasts displayed, for even in the jungle it is hard to observe. To anyone, however, who will watch a spider devour a fly, the true picture of merciless cruelty will be apparent. With its poisoned sword-like fangs it kills its prey, and then, with its sucking mouthparts, it sucks the juice out of the carcass.