Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/691

Rh cold weather; some inhabit the cellar, and others establish themselves in the corners of rooms, the angles of windows, openings in the woodwork, or chinks in the walls, and each has its special adaptations and modes of life.



Fig. 1 represents a small house-spider as seen under a magnifying-glass. It has eight eyes, simple in structure, and incapable of motion, but disposed in two rows on the top of the head, so that they enable the creature to espy its prey, from whatever quarter it may approach. Fig. 2 is this part of the animal represented still more highly magnified.



Spiders, being carnivorous, must make other creatures their prey, and they are very effectually provided with the means of doing so. No other animal is so terribly armed. Below the eyes (Fig. 1, b b) you perceive the large basal joints of the jaws, or mandibles as they are termed, with which they do their small work of butchery. Fig. 3 shows the appearance of this deadly instrument greatly magnified. "Picture to yourself a pair of huge, sharp-pointed jack-knives with extremely broad handles, the blades being so opposed to one another, that, when they are forcibly driven into an object, their pointed