l
enough from the downpour. Even so do Sheep, when caught in a storm in
the pastures, gather close, huddle together and make a common rampart of
their backs.

The assembly into a ball-shaped mass is also the rule in calm, bright
weather, after the morning's exertions. In the afternoon, the climbers
collect at a higher point, where they weave a wide, conical tent, with
the end of a shoot for its top, and, gathered into a compact group, spend
the night there. Next day, when the heat returns, the ascent is resumed
in long files, following the shrouds which a few pioneers have rigged and
which those who come after elaborate with their own work.

Collected nightly into a globular troop and sheltered under a fresh tent,
for three or four days, each morning, before the sun grows too hot, my
little emigrants thus raise themselves, stage by stage, on both bamboos,
until they reach the sun-unit, at fifteen feet above the ground. The
climb comes to an end for lack of foothold.

Under normal conditions, the ascent would be shorter. The young Spiders
have at their disposal the bushes, the brushwood, providing supports on
every side for the threads wafted hither and thither by the eddying air-
currents. With these rope-bridges flung across space, the dispersal
presents no difficulties. Each emigrant leaves at his own good time and
travels as suits him best.

My devices have changed these conditions somewhat. My two bristling
poles stand at a distance from the surrounding shrubs, especially the one
which I planted in the middle of the yard. Bridges are out of the
question, for the threads flung into the air are not long enough. And so
the acrobats, eager to get away, keep on climbing, never come down again,
are impelled to seek in a higher position what they have failed to find
in a lower. The top of my two bamboos probably fails to represent the
limit of what my keen climbers are capable of achieving.

We shall see, in a moment, the object of this climbing-propensity, which
is a sufficiently remarkable instinct in the Garden Spiders, who have as
their domain the low-growing brushwood wherein their nets are spread; it
becomes a still more remarkable instinct in the Lycosa, who, except at
the moment when she leaves her mother's back, never quits the ground and
yet, in the early hours of her life, shows herself as ardent a wooer of
high places as the young Garden Spiders.

Let us consider the Lycosa in particular. In h