the sac, and, in the North, they spend the long winter there.

They do not have two stages of existence as beetles or butterflies do, but are hatched out mature and equipped with the poison fangs which aid them in their strictly carnivorous, and often even cannibalistic, existence.

They grow and shed their skins as do the baby grasshoppers, but they do not change their form with each moult and none of them have wings.

They have inside their bodies, reservoirs of strange, sticky fluids which they can pour out through spigots in many different ways. This fluid, as it dries, may form drag lines which they trail behind them and fasten as they go to use for safety lines; with some spiders it may even be poured out in such quantities that it makes an aeroplane; with the majority, however, it is used to make their nests or their egg sacs or the marvelously beautiful orbs that prove the graveyards of so many careless insects. For the spiders are the enemies of the insect world; were they more discriminating, they would be perhaps the greatest friends of the human race, but, as they suck all kinds of insects’ blood, all that we can be sure of is that those among them which we find in our houses are a benefit, for there they kill the flies and other insects which we do not want indoors.

To their Southern and especially their tropical cousins, which attack and sometimes kill human beings, this group of fascinating creatures owes the dread in which it is held by people in general. It is a pity, for throughout the Northern states, no dangerous species is known to exist, and those which frequent our houses will no more attack us than do the flies they catch and devour.

Until a child has gazed in wonder at an orb weaver as it spins its web between the trees, or been an eye-witness of the death of some insect unlucky enough to fall into a web, he has not taken his first step toward the wonderland which touches him on every side and he is in grave danger of growing up with a blind side—the side turned toward the field and forest.

There are millions upon millions of spiders, and thousands of species, and they live everywhere from the Arctic Regions to the Tropics. They devour countless myriads of flies and gnats and hosts of other insects, and nobody knows just what good they do us, but every entomologist would hold up his hands in fear at what the result might be should the spiders of the world be blotted out. They must hold countless parasites in check and help to keep the balance even.

If all the little children should learn that they are harmless, I wonder if they could not stop their nurses from killing them. It is the ignorance of those who train our little ones that keeps alive the unreasoning hatred towards so many of the wonder creatures of the woods.

AN EIGHT EYED ENEMY OF THE FLY; A JUMPING SPIDER

(Phidippus audax, Hentz)

We are so accustomed to beasts with two eyes that it is hard to realize that all around us, though hard to see, are little monsters with many eyes of various sizes.

This one has eight eyes, four of which are invisible from the front. The eyes are diurnal, enabling the creature to hunt only by day. Its eight stout legs fit it for jumping forward or sideways with great ease. In comparison with its size, its jumping powers are incredible. If it were the size of a tiger, it would be a beast of prey which could clear a quarter of a mile at a bound.

It can sit on a branch and throw out an elastic dragline behind, strong enough to bear its weight, and by this means it is able to jump at and catch its prey on the fly, regaining its position by climbing up the dragline. Add to this that it possesses a pair of powerful hollow fangs, into which poison sacs empty, and a voraciousness which often leads it into cannibalism, and you have a fair picture of this jumping spider, which is one of a thousand species of little creatures found everywhere except in the polar regions. They range in size from a third to a half an inch long and live under stones and sticks, spending the winter in a silken bag of their own manufacture, but never spinning a web. The males of some species have been observed to dance before the females, holding up their hairy legs above their heads apparently to show off their ornamentation.

READY TO POUNCE ON A FLY ON THE WING; THE JUMPING SPIDER

These is something diabolical in the way these four black eyes in a row stare one out of countenance.

A JUMPING SPIDER READY TO SPRING FROM A LEAF

(Phidippus togatus, Koch.)

I must confess to a peculiar feeling of embarrassment, almost of fear, towards a jumping spider. It stares at you so intently and seems no fearless as it wheels to keep you covered with its battery of eyes; and you never know which way it is going to jump.

THE WOLF-SPIDER

(Lycosa carolinensis, Walck.)

This is not the photograph of a polar bear, but that of a wolf-spider, with a battery of eight eyes on the top of its head and poison fangs hanging below.

Some such impression as this, I imagine, must be made on the retina of a fly or beetle when, in wandering through the grass at dusk, it suddenly finds itself face to face with a wolf-spider sitting on the turret which forms the entrance to its web-lined hole in the ground.

Behind and above the fangs and hidden in their shadow is the creature’s mouth, toothless and made for sucking only. With his fangs, this wolf-spider kills and crushes his victim; then he sucks the body dry and throws away the carcass.

Seen here and there above the body hairs are black spines, hollow inside and connected with the nerves of touch. Of his eyes, the two in the center in front are supposed to be for use by day, while all the others are nocturnal, enabling him to stalk his prey at dusk. It is the wolf-spider that often appears at night within the circle of lamplight searching for nocturnal insects.

The nocturnal eyes are remarkable organs, with reflecting structures so placed behind the retina that the light entering the eye traverses the retina twice, and it is supposed that this reflecting structure increases the effect of any faint light, enabling the creature to “see in the dark.”

This is a hunting spider, chasing its prey through the grass or lurking under stones, especially in damp places.

It does not spin a web, but lives in a silk-lined hole six or eight inches deep, which it digs in the ground, and around the entrance to which, out of sticks and grass, it builds a turret or watch-tower, from which it can see its prey more readily than from the ground. These spider holes are common in the