Wonderful, isn't it? And it didn't take Mrs. Spider more than an hour to make it. If it is destroyed she seems to have plenty of material to build another. It really is Mrs. Spider who does all this work. You will nearly always find her living alone. Mr. Spider is very much smaller than she is, and he is not a worker. As the female bees do all the work, and drive the drones or males out ot the hives, or even kill them, so Mrs. Spider barely tolerates her mate and even eats him if other food is scarce. She builds her own house, catches her own food, looks after her babies, and lives all alone in a busy solitude.
A long, long time ago the work of this clever spinner and weaver was looked upon as pure magic. The Greeks made a wonder story about her. The spider was a maiden named Arachne (A-rak'ne). In a contest of spinning and weaving she proved herself better than the wise goddess Athe'na. To punish her for daring to be more clever than a goddess, Arachne was turned into a spider, and told to spend the rest of her days making her wonderful web. Unable to talk, Arachne kept the secret of her spinning until men made microscopes. Now, it seems as if this little creature could always have told men how to make spinning frames to turn cotton, silk, wool and flax fibres into yarn.
At the rear end of her abdomen are from two to eight little pin-head knobs, in pairs. These are spinnerets. Each one is covered with hollow bristles. Altogether there may be a thousand of them. From each one comes a hair of liquid silk. They all flow, or are twisted together into one thread. The spider seems able to expel, or shoot out, the silk and fasten it to any support, and to use the lengthening cable to propel herself. Haven't you seen house-spiders let themselves down from ceilings by these silk cords? Once started a web thread seems to be pulled from the spinner as fast as she travels.
The spider is not an insect, as are the fly, the ant, the bee and butterfly. She has eight legs, while insects have but six. Her body is in two parts instead of three. Her legs are jointed like a lobster's, and like the lobster and crab she is a fierce fighter, and hunter. If a leg is torn off in a fight she is usually able to grow another one. She has no wings to fly, but is a regular acrobat, doing high jumps, and long leaps, and tight-rope walking and cliff-climbing up smooth walls. You see, she has eight legs, each one with seven joints. Seven times eight are fifty-six joints, and all of them are as limber as a trapeze performer's. The spider's jaws are steel traps with biting
