Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/812

792 to one which is running rapidly along the road or trying to hide itself in the grass. It is carrying a pure white, round shell—the sack containing the eggs—in making which it has expended all the silk it had (Fig. 4). A mother of incomparable vigilance, homeless, its eggs laid and well protected in the silky walls of the shell, it does not abandon the cradle of its offspring for an instant. If we succeed in seizing one of the animals during its journey and take away its cocoon, the spider, usually so timid, instead of running away, makes a show of fight against the aggressor. If the cocoon is on the ground, it makes most earnest efforts to take it up and run away as quickly as possible. As soon as the young are hatched they attach themselves to the body of their mother, and she carries them till they are strong enough to hunt a prey, crafty enough to deceive an enemy, and ungrateful enough to cease to recognize a mother whose care has become of no use to them. Large lycosas adorned with lively colors inhabit southern Europe, Africa, and some parts of Asia. They are wanderers like their congeners of cold and temperate countries, and have the advantage over them of a longer existence and of having fixed retreats. They dig a cell in the ground, tapestry its walls, and weave a barricade of crossed threads across the entrance. Among them is the tarantula, concerning the effect of whose bite many marvelous but fictitious stories are told.

The smaller rivers of Europe are inhabited by an aquatic spider, the Argyronetus aquaticus, the first observation of which was a considerable surprise to the Père de Lignac, who discovered it and first described it. It was in 1747, and he was bathing in a river near Mans, when, he relates, "I was surprised by a wonderful sight: bubbles of air, bright as polished silver, appeared to swim around me and follow me. Their free movements, which were not determined by the motion of the water or by the levity of the air, declared that they were animated. My surprise shortly became astonishment when I perceived that they were large spiders whose bodies were enveloped in air." Two years afterward, Lignac obtained several specimens of the argyronetus, and made a closer study of them. While their nearly constant abode is the water, they are, like most other spiders, air-breathers; consequently they need some special provision for providing themselves with air while living under the water, and for this purpose they possess the art of constructing a kind of diving-bell. It is an interesting sight to witness one of them making his air-cell. Clinging to the lower side of a few leaves, and securing them in position by spinning a few threads, the spider rises to the level of the water, with its belly uppermost, and, doubling up its hind-legs, retains a stratum of air among the hairs with which its body is covered. Then it. plunges into the water and appears as in the