Spiders and their Webs

New Zealand Tablet, 20 September 1906, Page 15

Spiders and their Webs

All spiders spin, but not all of them spin snares those orbed and radiated webs that we see pictured so many times and every time pictured wrone (says a writer in • Ainslee's '), but that only goes to show that the lower animals are not the -only ones that possess instinct. I think it will be generally- agreed that artists may be classed among the higher animals. Here of late, though, I think I have noticed a little improvement in artists.' They have begun to notice that the spider always stands head downward in her web, if it be a perpendicular one, and if it is horizontal hangs back downward. Some flat web spiders can hardly walk right side up. But the spider of art never has more than six legs, while the real spider has eight, and the spider of art often has three sections of the body, while the real spider never has more than two. The head and chest are in one department, so to speak. There are their eyes, from four to eight in number, and disposed in different patterns according to their political affiliations ; their jaws, which work sidewise instead of up and down • their poison-bag and a few other arrangements, and in the abdomen, or silk department, are the heart (a banana-shaped affair), the Jiver, the slit and tubes that do duty for lungs and the -spinnerets. These last are warty looking affairs that may be spread apart and brought together exactly like the thumb and fingers of the hand. Each wart is covered with hundreds of little hollow hairs through which is expressed a gummy liquid that turns to silk when it dries. Mrs Spi-der slaps her spinnerets broad against the -wall and sticks fast (I don't know how) many hundreds of'fine filaments. Then she pulls away the spinnerets and shuts them up, and all of those fine filaments melt into one rope, in thickness about one five-thousandth of an inch. Insects' silk is a simple thread •' spiders' is compound.