pt in contemplation, as though indifferent to what the others are
doing, she awaits the hop of the Locust.

Nevertheless, these close quarters have their drawbacks when laying-time
arrives. The cords by which the different establishments are hung
interlace and criss-cross in a confused network. When one of them
shakes, all the others are more or less affected. This is enough to
distract the layer from her business and to make her do silly things.
Here are two instances.

A bag has been woven during the night. I find it, when I visit the cage
in the morning, hanging from the trellis-work and completed. It is
perfect, as regards structure; it is decorated with the regulation black
meridian curves. There is nothing missing, nothing except the essential
thing, the eggs, for which the spinstress has gone to such expense in the
matter of silks. Where are the eggs? They are not in the bag, which I
open and find empty. They are lying on the ground below, on the sand in
the pan, utterly unprotected.

Disturbed at the moment of discharging them, the mother has missed the
mouth of the little bag and dropped them on the floor. Perhaps even, in
her excitement, she came down from above and, compelled by the exigencies
of the ovaries, laid her eggs on the first support that offered. No
matter: if her Spider brain contains the least gleam of sense, she must
be aware of the disaster and is therefore bound at once to abandon the
elaborate manufacture of a now superfluous nest.

Not at all: the bag is woven around nothing, as accurate in shape, as
finished in structure as under normal conditions. The absurd
perseverance displayed by certain Bees, whose egg and provisions I used
to remove, {20} is here repeated without the slightest interference from
me. My victims used scrupulously to seal up their empty cells. In the
same way, the Epeira puts the eiderdown quilting and the taffeta wrapper
round a capsule that contains nothing.

Another, distracted from her work by some startling vibration, leaves her
nest at the moment when the layer of red-brown wadding is being
completed. She flees to the dome, at a few inches above her unfinished
work, and spends upon a shapeless mattress, of no use whatever, all the
silk with which she would have woven the outer wrapper if nothing had
come to disturb her.

Poor fool! You upholster the wires of your cage with swan's-down and you
leave the eggs imperfectly protected. The absence