ycosa go back home? Perhaps not, for
a while. Besides, she would have to go out a second time, to manufacture
her pill on a level space of sufficient extent.

When the work is done, some of them emancipate themselves, think they
will have a look at the country before retiring for good and all. It is
these whom we sometimes meet wandering aimlessly and dragging their bag
behind them. Sooner or later, however, the vagrants return home; and the
month of August is not over before a straw rustled in any burrow will
bring the mother up, with her wallet slung behind her. I am able to
procure as many as I want and, with them, to indulge in certain
experiments of the highest interest.

It is a sight worth seeing, that of the Lycosa dragging her treasure
after her, never leaving it, day or night, sleeping or waking, and
defending it with a courage that strikes the beholder with awe. If I try
to take the bag from her, she presses it to her breast in despair, hangs
on to my pincers, bites them with her poison-fangs. I can hear the
daggers grating on the steel. No, she would not allow herself to be
robbed of the wallet with impunity, if my fingers were not supplied with
an implement.

By dint of pulling and shaking the pill with the forceps, I take it from
the Lycosa, who protests furiously. I fling her in exchange a pill taken
from another Lycosa. It is at once seized in the fangs, embraced by the
legs and hung on to the spinneret. Her own or another's: it is all one
to the Spider, who walks away proudly with the alien wallet. This was to
be expected, in view of the similarity of the pills exchanged.

A test of another kind, with a second subject, renders the mistake more
striking. I substitute, in the place of the lawful bag which I have
removed, the work of the Silky Epeira. The colour and softness of the
material are the same in both cases; but the shape is quite different.
The stolen object is a globe; the object presented in exchange is an
elliptical conoid studded with angular projections along the edge of the
base. The Spider takes no account of this dissimilarity. She promptly
glues the queer bag to her spinnerets and is as pleased as though she
were in possession of her real pill. My experimental villainies have no
other consequences beyond an ephemeral carting. When hatching-time
arrives, early in the case of the Lycosa, late in that of the Epeira, the
gulled Spider abandons the strange bag and pays i