nd artistic piece
of workmanship than that of its European relative. The tarantula has no
door to her burrow, but instead she builds about the entrance a kind of
breastwork an inch high and nearly two inches in diameter, and from this
fortress sallies out upon her prey. She sinks a deeper shaft than does
our spider, but excavates it in the same way with similar tools, her
fangs, and lines it with silk from her own body.

Our spider is an artist, evidently the master builder and architect of
her kind. Considering her soft and pussy-like appearance--no visible
drills for such rough work--one wonders how she excavates a burrow six
inches or more deep in this hard adobe soil of the Pacific coast, and
how she removes the dirt after she has loosened it. But she has been
surprised at her work; her tools are her two fangs, the same weapons
with which she seizes and dispatches her prey, and the rake or the
_chelicerae_. To use these delicate instruments in such coarse work, says
Fabre, seems as "illogical as it would to dig a pit with a surgeon's
scalpel." And she carries the soil out in her mandibles, a minute pellet
at a time, and drops it here and there at some distance from her nest.
Her dooryard is never littered with it. It takes her one hour to dig a
hole the size of half an English walnut, and to remove the earth.

One afternoon I cut off the doors from two nests and left them turned
over, a few inches away. The next morning I found that the occupants of
the nests, under cover of the darkness, had each started the
construction of a new door, and had it about half finished. It seemed as
if the soil on the hinge side had begun to grow, and had put out a
semicircular bit of its surface toward the opposite side of the orifice,
each new door copying exactly the color of the ground that surrounded
it, one gray from dead vegetable matter, the other a light brick-red. I
read somewhere of an experimenter who found a nest on a mossy bit of
ground protectively colored in this way. He removed the lid and made the
soil bare about. The spider made a new lid and covered it with moss like
the old one, and her art had the opposite effect to what it had in the
first case. This is typical of the working of the insect mind. It seems
to know everything, and yet to know nothing, as we use the term "know."

On the second morning, one of the doors had attained its normal size,
but not yet its normal thickness and strength. It was much more art