Its eight long, crab-like legs are made for spinning, and across the openings in the forest it stretches a great net in which to snare its game. On this it sits protected from the birds to whose eyes it looks from above like some bird's droppings in the web. This one is a female and its mate is said to be much smaller and quite different, with no humps or spines at all and a long narrow body. The courtship of spiders is often a dangerous business for the male, and perhaps it is quite as well for him that he is often smaller and more agile than his mate, for if the female is not ready to receive his advances, she is apt to pounce upon him and destroy him. [Illustration] THE BIRD-DROPPING SPIDER, A CREATURE WITH PROTECTIVE COLORING (_Epeira verrucosa_, Hentz) This orb weaver had swung its net across a wood road, and so perfectly did the white patch on its back resemble a bird's dropping that until my hand touched the net I failed to realize that a living thing was hanging there. There is something strangely fascinating about the compelling force of instinct: a spider hatched in captivity who has never seen a web made, will weave its own in the same delicate and intricate pattern that its mother made, using the different kinds of rope correctly, and spacing each strand with a mathematical precision. Indeed, the web of this untutored little spiderling will be as characteristic of its species as the white spot upon its back. It would be as though a child, cast alone on a desert island, should build a house in all details precisely like its ancestral home. [Illustration] THE AERIAL TRAPPER: THE ORB-WEAVING SPIDER (_Epeira trivittata_, Keys.) Hidden behind these eight four-jointed legs of varying lengths, covered with hollow, sensitive bristles, is the spider's head, with eight eyes, strong jaws, poison fangs, and a pair of palpi, which look like extremely short legs and seem to serve as hands. The hairy body is filled with thousands of eggs and contains also a marvelous reservoir of liquid rope opening into spinnerets on the under side of the body. Some of the tubes or spinnerets make strong and dry filaments and others make sticky ones. The radiating threads of the spider's web, those which compose the framework, are stiff and dry; the spiral threads, however, which join them together, are coated with a substance which no little flying creature can strike against without running the risk of sticking fast. Before you are up on a summer's morning this wonderful creature will have manufactured what would be equivalent to two miles of elastic and sticky rope if she were as large as a six-foot man. With the skill of an experienced fish-net maker, she will, in a few hours, construct a net as large as a cartwheel, which like the whale-nets of New Zealand, though they may break with the floundering of the prey, bewilder it and tire it out with struggling.