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Show REMARKABLE FEATS BY SPIDERS. A small-sized spider had made his web on the under side of a table. Early one morning a small grasshopper was noticed on the floor, directly under the web, and on approaching to take it away it was found that the spider had thrown a line round one of its legs. While the observer was looking at it, the spider came down and lassoed the opposite leg of the grasshopper, and continued for several minutes darting up and down, and fastening lines of different parts of the body of his victim. The struggles of the grasshopper, though a full-grown one, were unavailing to effect his escape. As his struggles became more and more feeble, the spider threw his lines round him; and when he had become nearly exhausted his captor proceeded to raise him from the floor. This he did by raising the head and part of the body nearly half an inch, then raised the other end, and continued so to work until the grasshopper was elevated five or six inches. Thus hung in chains, the victim was left to die. The "trap door spider" is indeed most interesting. Erber tells us in Life and Her Children, by A. B. Buckley, that he once sat for hours on a moonlight night watching the doings of these insects. He saw two of the spiders come out each from his hole, and pushing upon their doors, fasten them back by fine threads to blades of grass. They then spun a web round the open hole, and went back into their tunnel. By and by two beetles were caught, one in each web. In an instant the spiders darted out, and pierced their victims with their poisoned fangs, sucked out their soft flesh, and carried the empty bodies away some distance from their holes. Erber left them, but on returning in the morning, he found the spiders had cleared away all trace of the web, and were shut down snugly in their hidden homes. Who among us works more cleverly or with more industry for his daily broad then these little spiders? They do it, too, under many difficulties and dangers, for birds and lizards are watching above-ground to make a meal of them, while crawling insects creep into their holes to attack them. Some of these spiders have learned a means of escaping even this danger, for they make a second tunnel branching out of the first, and build a doorway between the two, so that they can retreat into the second passage in case of attack, and, by setting their backs against the door, battle the intruder.-Harper's Young People. |