ly rest. He thus
describes this remarkable pet: "I fed him with flies for a few days,
until he began to find himself in very comfortable quarters, and thought
of spinning a nest and making his home. This he did by winding himself
round and round, combing out the silk from the spinnerets at the end of
his body till he had made a nest as large as a wine-glass, in which he
sat motionless until he saw a fly get inside our gauzy tent; then I
could fancy I saw his eyes twinkle as his victim buzzed about, till,
when it was within a yard or so of him, he took one spring and the fly
was in his forceps, and another leap took him back to his den, where he
soon finished the savoury morsel. Sometimes he would bound from side to
side of the bed and seize a mosquito at every spring, resting only a
moment on the net to swallow it. In another corner of the room was the
nest of a female Mygale of the same species. She spun some beautiful
little silk bags, larger than a thimble, of tough yellow silk, in each
of which she laid more than a dozen eggs. When these hatched the young
spiders used to live on her back until they were old enough to hunt for
themselves. I kept my useful friend on my bed for more than a year and a
half, when, unfortunately, a new housemaid spied his pretty brown house,
pulled it down, and crushed under her black feet my poor companion."
This kind of spider, or an allied species, captures large butterflies in
the tropical woods by hanging strong silken noozes from branches of
trees, and they have been seen to kill small birds by this method. One
of our British spiders lives under water in a dome-like cell of silk,
which is filled with air like a diving-bell by the spider carrying down
successive globules of air between its legs, which it liberates under
the dome until it is filled; and the young are hatched there.

The spider, on its way through the water, never gets wet. It is hairy,
and is enveloped in a bubble of air, in which it moves about protected
from wet and well supplied with air to breathe. As the spider's supply
of food is always precarious, they are able to live a long time without
eating. One is known to have lived eighteen months corked up in a
phial, where it could obtain no food; but though thus able to fast, the
spider is a voracious feeder, and will eat his own kith and kin when
hard pressed by hunger.

I believe it is now thought that the spider of the Scriptures was a kind
of spiny lizard called