It might be supposed that the work was at length finished and that a well-earned rest might be enjoyed, but this was far from being the case. The spider remained as active as ever though an hour or two passed before the object of its industry was evident. All this time it was incessantly climbing backwards and forwards between the egg-sheet and the hammock and generally scrimmaging round in the most unaccountable way, but it gradually became evident that the eggs were being enclosed in a wonderful transparent box of filmy silk with the egg-bearing sheet for its roof. By nine o’clock it was of moderate strength and opacity, and the spider, having worked “the clock round,” no longer laboured continuously. Days elapsed, however, before it was entirely finished to the satisfaction of the spider, which remained all the time in close proximity to the box and could with difficulty be frightened away, but clung tenaciously to it when interfered with. Now this remarkable performance, which any reader endowed with sufficient patience may observe for himself, gives food for thought. The spider has never seen a cocoon constructed and has no model to work by, and yet it performs with absolute precision all the stages, in their proper succession, of a work which involves quite a number of different spinning operations, nor does the absence of light by which to work trouble it in the slightest. It seems hard to believe that this is not a sign of high intelligence and that the spider is probably quite unconscious of the object for which it has laboured so long and so aptly. But how otherwise explain this curious fact? If the eggs are removed the moment they are laid the work is continued precisely as if they were still there. The box is laboriously built round the place where they ought to be, and the spider refuses to budge from the empty casket, though there is no longer any treasure to guard. Clearly as the egg-laying time approaches the spider feels an irresistible blind impulse to perform in a definite order certain complicated actions. It is like a machine actuated by an internal spring, and in the spider’s case the internal spring is the inherited nervous mechanism we call instinct, which urges it to actions which it is not in the least necessary that it should understand. CHAPTER VII WATER-SPIDERS Here is the place to insert a short account of some near relations of _Agelena_ which we shall certainly not meet in our walk, but of which the mode of life is too interesting to be altogether passed over in silence.