us or predatory races--an
insensate and almost automatic courage.

I need hardly say, however, that the spider does not kill her prey by a
mere fair-and-square bite alone. She has recourse to the art of the
Palmers and Brinvilliers. All spiders, as far as known, are provided
with poison-fangs in the jaws, which sometimes, as in the tarantula and
many other large tropical kinds, well known to me in Jamaica and
elsewhere, are sufficiently powerful to produce serious effects upon
man himself; while even much smaller spiders, like Eliza and Lucy, have
poison enough in their falces, as the jawlike organs are called, to
kill a good big insect, such as a wasp or a bumble-bee. These
channelled poison-glands, combined with their savage tigerlike claws,
make the spiders as a group extremely formidable and dominant
creatures, the analogues in their own smaller invertebrate world of the
serpents and wolves in the vertebrate creation.

Lucy and Eliza's family relations, I am sorry to say, were not, we
found, of a kind to endear them to a critical public already
sufficiently scandalized by their general mode of behaviour to their
inoffensive neighbours. As mothers, indeed, gossip itself had not a
word of blame to whisper against them; but as wives, their conduct was
distinctly open to the severest animadversion. The males of the garden
spider, as in many other instances, are decidedly smaller than their
big round mates; so much so is this the case, indeed, in certain
species that they seem almost like parasites of the immensely larger
sack-bodied females. Now, just as the worker bees kill off the drones
as soon as the queen-bee has been duly fertilized, regarding them as of
no further importance or value to the hive, so do the lady-spiders not
only kill but eat their husbands as soon as they find they have no
further use for them. Nay, if a female spider doesn't care for the
looks of a suitor who is pressing himself too much upon her fond
attention, her way of expressing her disapprobation of his appearance
and manners is to make a murderous spring at him, and, if possible,
devour him. Under these painful circumstances the process of courtship
is necessarily to some extent a difficult and delicate one, fraught
with no small danger to the adventurous swain who has the boldness to
commend himself by personal approach to these very fickle and irascible
fair ones. It was most curious and exciting, accordingly, to watch the
details of t