Before leaving the garden-spider let us undertake some little investigation of its mental powers—if it possesses any. The commonest mistake with regard to all animals is to interpret their actions from the human standpoint, and to credit them with emotions and with deliberate forethought of which there is in reality no proof whatever. The power to spin such a complicated snare as we have just described predisposes us to attribute a high order of intelligence to a creature capable of such an achievement, and when it “shams death” on being disturbed we immediately pronounce it “cunning.” The wildest conclusions are sometimes arrived at. One author, for instance, states that he has seen an Attid spider “instructing its young ones how to hunt” and adds that “whenever an old one missed its leap, it would run from the place and hide itself in some crevice as if ashamed of its mismanagement.” Such inferences, of course, were entirely unwarranted from the facts observed. Now the fact that a newly-hatched garden-spider can make a complete snare without ever having seen the operation performed immediately relegates that action to the realm of instinct,—not less wonderful than intelligence perhaps, but certainly quite distinct from it. With the much discussed origin of instinct we are not here concerned, but a pure instinct differs from intelligence in this: that it is due to inherited nervous mechanism and results in actions the object of which may be quite unknown to the actors. There is no conscious adaptation of means to an end. When a young spider spins a web there is not only no evidence that it does so with the deliberate purpose of catching flies, but many known facts go to prove that it performs the feat, “because it feels as if it must,” and is quite ignorant of the purpose to be subserved.