throes last for some time.  The experiment is not wholly satisfactory as regards suddenness.  Why?  Because the liquid which I employ, ammonia, cannot be compared, for deadly efficacy, with the Lycosa’s poison, a pretty formidable poison, as we shall see.

I make a Tarantula bite the leg of a young, well-fledged Sparrow, ready to leave the nest.  A drop of blood flows; the wounded spot is surrounded by a reddish circle, changing to purple.  The bird almost immediately loses the use of its leg, which drags, with the toes doubled in; it hops upon the other.  Apart from this, the patient does not seem to trouble much about his hurt; his appetite is good.  My daughters feed him on Flies, bread-crumb, apricot-pulp.  He is sure to get well, he will recover his strength; the poor victim of the curiosity of science will be restored to liberty.  This is the wish, the intention of us all.  Twelve hours later, the hope of a cure increases; the invalid takes nourishment readily; he clamours for it, if we keep him waiting.  But the leg still drags.  I set this down to a temporary paralysis which will soon disappear.  Two days after, he refuses his food.  Wrapping himself in his stoicism and his rumpled feathers, the Sparrow hunches into a ball, now motionless, now twitching.  My girls take him in the hollow of their hands and warm him with their breath.  The spasms become more frequent.  A gasp proclaims that all is over.  The bird is dead.

There was a certain coolness among us at the evening-meal.  I read mute reproaches, because of my experiment, in the eyes of my home-circle; I read an unspoken accusation of cruelty all around me.  The death of the unfortunate Sparrow had saddened the whole family.  I myself was not without some remorse of conscience: the poor result achieved seemed to me too dearly bought.  I am not made of the stuff of those who, without turning a hair, rip up live Dogs to find out nothing in particular.

Nevertheless, I had the courage to start afresh, this time on a Mole caught ravaging a bed of lettuces.  There was a danger lest my captive, with his famished stomach, should leave things in doubt, if we had to keep him for a few days.  He might die not of his wound, but of inanition, if I did not succeed in giving him suitable food, fairly plentiful and dispensed at fairly frequent intervals.  In that case, I ran a risk of ascribing to the poison what might well be the result of starvation.  I must therefore begin by finding out if it was possible for me to keep the Mole alive in captivity.  The animal was put into a large receptacle from which it could not get out and fed on a varied diet of insects—Beetles, Grasshoppers, especially Cicadae {15}—which it crunched up with an excellent appetite.  Twenty-four hours of this regimen convinced me that the Mole was making the best of the bill of fare and taking kindly to his captivity.

I make the Tarantula bite him at the tip of the snout.  When replaced in his cage, the Mole keeps on scratching his nose with his broad paws.  The thing seems to burn, to itch.  Henceforth, less and less of the provision of Cicadae is consumed; on the evening of the following day, it is refused altogether.  About thirty-six hours after being bitten, the Mole dies during the night and certainly not from inanition, for there are still half a dozen live Cicadae in the receptacle, as well as a few Beetles.

The bite of the Black-bellied Tarantula is therefore dangerous to other animals than insects: it is fatal to the Sparrow, it is fatal to the Mole.  Up to what point are we to generalize?  I do not know, because my enquiries extended no further.  Nevertheless, judging from the little that I saw, it appears to me that the bite of this Spider is not an accident which man can afford to treat lightly.  This is all that I have to say to the doctors.

To the philosophical entomologists I have something else to say: I have to call their attention to the consummate knowledge of the insect-killers, which vies with that of the paralyzers.  I speak of insect-killers in the plural, for the Tarantula must share her deadly art with a host of other Spiders, especially with those who hunt without nets.  These insect-killers, who live on their prey, strike the game dead instantaneously by stinging the nerve-centres of the neck; the paralyzers, on the other hand, who wish to keep the food fresh for their larvae, destroy the power of movement by stinging the game in the other nerve-centres.  Both of them attack the nervous chain, but they select the point according to the object to be attained.  If death be desired, sudden death, free from danger to the huntress, the insect is attacked in the neck; if mere paralysis be required, the neck is respected and the lower segments—sometimes one alone, sometimes three, sometimes all or nearly all, according to the special organization of the victim—receive the dagger-thrust.

Even the paralyzers, at least some of them, are acquainted with the immense vital importance of the nerve-centres of the neck.  We have seen the Hairy Ammophila munching the caterpillar’s brain, the Languedocian Sphex munching the brain of the Ephippigera, with the object of inducing a passing torpor.  But they simply squeeze the brain and do even this with a wise discretion; they are careful not to drive their sting into this fundamental centre of life; not one of them ever thinks of doing so, for the result would be a corpse which the larva would despise.  The Spider, on the other hand, inserts her double dirk there and there alone; any elsewhere it would inflict a wound likely to increase resistance through irritation.  She wants a venison for consumption without delay and brutally thrusts her fangs into the spot which the others so conscientiously respect.

If the instinct of these scientific murderers is not, in both cases, an inborn predisposition, inseparable from the animal, but an acquired habit, then I rack my brain in vain to understand how that habit can have been acquired.  Shroud these facts in theoretic mists as much as you will, you shall never succeed in veiling the glaring evidence which they afford of a pre-established order of things.

CHAPTER II: THE BANDED EPEIRA

In the inclement season of the year, when the insect has nothing to do and retires to winter quarters, the observer profits by the mildness of the sunny nooks and grubs in the sand, lifts the stones, searches the brushwood; and often he is stirred with a pleasurable excitement, when he lights upon some ingenious work of art, discovered unawares.  Happy are the simple of heart whose ambition is satisfied with such treasure-trove!  I wish them all the joys which it has brought me and which it will continue to bring me, despite the vexations of life, which grow ever more bitter as the years follow their swift downward course.

Should the seekers rummage among the wild grasses in the osier-beds and copses, I wish them the delight of finding the wonderful object that, at this moment, lies before my eyes.  It is the work of a Spider, the nest of the Banded Epeira (Epeira fasciata, LATR.).

A Spider is not an insect, according to the rules of classification; and as such the Epeira seems out of place here. {16}  A fig for systems!  It is immaterial to the student of instinct whether the animal have eight legs instead of six, or pulmonary sacs instead of air-tubes.  Besides, the Araneida belong to the group of segmented animals, organized in sections placed end to end, a structure to which the terms ‘insect’ and ‘entomology’ both refer.

Formerly, to describe this group, people said ‘articulate animals,’ an expression which