Among insects the spider is perhaps best calculated to attract the attention of the savage. The tarantula is in many respects a very extraordinary creature, and is endowed with powers of the most deadly nature, which naturally places it along with the rattlesnake in the category of creatures possessing supernatural attributes. Its curiously constructed house with the hinged door and smoothly plastered chamber must ever elicit the admiration of the beholder. But the spider, which spins a web and projects in mid-air a gossamer structure of marvelous symmetry and beauty, and builds an ambush from which to spring upon his prey, was probably one of the first instructors of adolescent man, and must have seemed to him a very deity. It is not strange, therefore, that the spider appears in the myths of the savages. With the great Shoshone family, according to Professor Powell, the spider was the first weaver, and taught that important art to the fathers. The Cherokees, in their legend of the origin of fire, "represent a portion of it as having been brought with them and sacredly guarded. Others say that after crossing wide waters they sent back for it to the Man of Fire from whom a little was conveyed over by a spider in his web."[144] The spider occurs but rarely in aboriginal American art, occasionally it seems, however, to have reached the dignity of religious consideration and to have been adopted as a totemic device. Had a single example only been found we would not be warranted in giving it a place among religious symbols. Four examples have come to my notice; these are all engraved on shell gorgets and are illustrated in Plate LXI. Two are from Illinois, one from Missouri, and the other from Tennessee.[145] The example shown in Fig. 1 was obtained by Mr. Croswell from a mound near New Madrid, Mo. It is described as a circular ornament, three inches in diameter, that had, apparently, been cut from a _Busycon_. Mr. Croswell says that "the convex face was entirely plain, but the concave side bears the figure of a tarantula, or large spider, very skillfully engraved, the body being formed by a circle inclosing a cross, showing beyond doubt its sacred and symbolic character. This ornament, when found, lay on the breast-bone of a skeleton, with the concave or ornamented side uppermost. Two holes in the upper part were evidently intended for the thong or string by which it had been suspended from the neck. A circumstance that renders this relic still more interesting is the fact that two other shell ornaments, bearing precisely similar devices, have recently been found in Illinois within seven miles of this city, thus proving that the figures were not a mere fanciful invention, but had some symbolic meaning."[146] The disk thus briefly described by Mr. Croswell is so much like the example shown in Fig. 3 that I shall not describe it further, but shall refer to its peculiarities in the descriptions of others that follow.