and without any wound that shows. The Spider next
retires and allows the bite to act, which it soon does. She then
returns.

If the victim be small, a Clothes-moth, for instance, it is consumed on
the spot, at the place where it was captured. But, for a prize of some
importance, on which she hopes to feast for many an hour, sometimes for
many a day, the Spider needs a sequestered dining-room, where there is
naught to fear from the stickiness of the network. Before going to it,
she first makes her prey turn in the converse direction to that of the
original rotation. Her object is to free the nearest spokes, which
supplied pivots for the machinery. They are essential factors which it
behoves her to keep intact, if need be by sacrificing a few cross-bars.

It is done; the twisted ends are put back into position. The
well-trussed game is at last removed from the web and fastened on behind
with a thread. The Spider then marches in front and the load is trundled
across the web and hoisted to the resting-floor, which is both an
inspection-post and a dining-hall. When the Spider is of a species that
shuns the light and possesses a telegraph-line, she mounts to her daytime
hiding-place along this line, with the game bumping against her heels.

While she is refreshing herself, let us enquire into the effects of the
little bite previously administered to the silk-swathed captive. Does
the Spider kill the patient with a view to avoiding unseasonable jerks,
protests so disagreeable at dinner-time? Several reasons make me doubt
it. In the first place, the attack is so much veiled as to have all the
appearance of a mere kiss. Besides, it is made anywhere, at the first
spot that offers. The expert slayers {33} employ methods of the highest
precision: they give a stab in the neck, or under the throat; they wound
the cervical nerve-centres, the seat of energy. The paralyzers, those
accomplished anatomists, poison the motor nerve-centres, of which they
know the number and position. The Epeira possesses none of this fearsome
knowledge. She inserts her fangs at random, as the Bee does her sting.
She does not select one spot rather than another; she bites indifferently
at whatever comes within reach. This being so, her poison would have to
possess unparalleled virulence to produce a corpse-like inertia no matter
which the point attacked. I can scarcely believe in instantaneous death
resulting from the bite, especially in