Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/819

Rh of the two sexes, marked enough in all spiders, is greatly exaggerated in these two species, of which the male is a mere myrmidon by the side of the female (Fig. 11). In the Mediterranean countries, pretty epeïras, mostly of a silvery luster, fabricate a web with regular meshes and having a singular attachment, the use of which was first discovered by M. Vinson by observing one of the species common to Mauritius and Réunion. The webs are distinguished by a single silvery thread of enormous size compared with the other threads, running across them in zigzag folds. Not having seen any use made of this cable, M. Vinson cut it several times. It was replaced in a few hours. Flies and small insects flying against the web were seized and bound without calling this thread into use. Finally, a large grasshopper was ensnared, when in an instant the spider undid the large thread and quickly bound up in it the nimble giant, against which cords strong enough to hold flies would count for nothing. This, then, was its purpose, and it is hardly possible sufficiently to admire the instinct that prompted the preparation of it.

While most of the epeïras are lovers of the daylight, a few of them are active at night. Some species of the Mascarene Islands and Madagascar weave webs in the twilight which they destroy at dawn. During the day they hide under heaps of leaves which they have gathered up into a kind of nest. Their webs are coarsely spun, as becomes a nomad who has to pitch his tent anew every night, and has no time to waste in elegance. Some of them, however, are not satisfied to pass their days in heaps of leaves, but construct a kind of nest out of thin silk as a more eligible habitation. Of these more refined spiders, the Epeïra Borbonica, with its cherry-colored body and lustrous black legs, fixes its night-web and its day-tent to the roofs of houses, the projections of rocks, and the branches of large trees. The much larger