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Time was when, unaware of this fierce intolerance, which is more savage still at breeding time, I saw hideous orgies perpetrated in my overstocked cages. I shall have occasion to describe those tragedies later. Let us meanwhile consider the isolated Lycosae.
I believe I have made it sufficiently clear that the young Lycosae take no food as long as they remain with their mother. Strictly speaking, doubt is just admissible, for observation is needs dumb as to what may happen earlier or later within the mysteries of the burrow. It seems possible that the repleted mother may there disgorge to her family a mite of the contents of her crop.
There must be other powers at play in the tiny animal's machinery. Total abstinence from food could be understood, if it were accompanied by inertia: immobility is not life. But the young Lycosae, although usually quiet on their mother's back, are at all times ready for exercise and for agile swarming.
The silly Sheep does not reply to the butcher's knife by charging with lowered horns. Can it be that you are the Pompilus' Sheep? My two subjects are reinstalled in my study under their wire-gauze covers, with bed of sand, reed-stump burrow and fresh honey, complete. Here they find again their first Lycosae, fed upon Locusts.
The problem is one of the most important that science can set us. Let us first hear the evidence of the young Lycosae regarding its possibilities. For seven months, without any material nourishment, they expend strength in moving. To wind up the mechanism of their muscles, they recruit themselves direct with heat and light.
I will endeavour to satisfy their desires. I take a nine-foot reed, with tiny branches spreading right up to the top, and place it above the cage. The little Lycosae clamber to the very summit. Here, longer threads are produced from the rope-yard and are now left to float, anon converted into bridges by the mere contact of the free end with the neighbouring supports.
It is the climbing instinct, unknown to the adult spider, and soon forgotten by the emancipated young, who are destined to roam upon the face of the earth. But the young Lycosae, anxious to leave the maternal home and to travel, become suddenly ardent climbers and aeronauts, each releasing a long, light thread which serves it as parachute.
There must be other powers at play in the tiny animal's machinery. Total abstinence from food could be understood, if it were accompanied by inertia: immobility is not life. But the young Lycosae, though usually quiet on their mother's back, are at all times ready for exercise and for agile swarming.
The mighty Spider of the waste-lands, therefore, attains to an even more patriarchal age than her neighbour the Sacred Beetle: she lives for five years at the very least. Let us leave the mothers to their business and return to the youngsters. It is not without a certain surprise that we see the little Lycosae, at the first moment of their emancipation, hasten to ascend the heights.
Possessing more windfalls than they know what to do with, all picked up in their immediate neighbourhood, my Lycosae have built themselves donjon-keeps the like of which their race has not yet known. Around the orifice, on a slightly sloping bank, small, flat, smooth stones have been laid to form a broken, flagged pavement.
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