Having taken our fill of the spiders’ feet we may well turn our attention to their heads. If we have caught a spider in the act of killing a struggling fly, it must have struck us that one bite from the spider is sufficient to kill its victim. Let us see if we can find the jaws which so quickly bring death even to large insects. We shall require a steady hand and some little skill to examine them properly but the task is not beyond our powers. Having killed our spider we must snip off its head, place it on a slide and examine it with a low magnification. Looking straight at the face, we can plainly see the sharply pointed, hinged jaws; in nearly all spiders they work from side to side and they can be closed on their hinges like pocket knives. With a pair of mounted needles and two steady hands, let us dissect the head of our spider, so that we obtain one of the jaws quite free from its surroundings. At the base we shall find a little sac, the poison gland, and if we now magnify the jaw much more highly we shall observe a tiny hole very near the tip. When the spider has grasped her prey in her jaws she causes the poison from the poison glands to pass into the body of her victim, by way of the little hole in her jaw; the poison causes paralysis and the victim struggles no more. The only excuse we can make for spending so much time with the spiders is that they are of the greatest interest to the microscopist. Returning to our friend the garden spider we must examine the spinning organs, known as spinnerets. These are to be found near the tip of the abdomen on the under side. There are six pairs in all in the garden spider but the middle pair are shorter than the others and, in consequence, not easily seen. The tips of the fleshy little spinnerets should be highly magnified and we shall notice that the structure of the tips differs in each pair of spinnerets. On the foremost pair, there is a fairly large projection and numerous small ones; on the middle pair three large projections and many smaller ones, whilst on the hind pair, in addition to the small projections there are five large ones. The large projections are called spigots and the small ones are known as spools; from the former is derived the strong silk of the web, from the spools the fine threads issue. On the underside of our garden spider there is a dark patch and, just in front of this dark spot, are a pair of slits. These we must open up very carefully, in a dead specimen of course, and within, if we have succeeded in our dissection, we shall see from fifteen to twenty little flaps resembling the leaves of a book, in fact they are known as lung books and, by means of them, the spider breathes.