Spiders and their Ways

Spiders live in both hemispheres, from the torrid zone to the coldest regions. Over all the world they are distinguished by their singular aspects and curious habits...

As classified by naturalists, the spiders compose an order of the class of Arachnida. They are the Araneids, a division so well characterized and perfectly circumscribed that it is sufficiently designated when it is named. In these animals the head and corselet are confounded into a single mass, at the upper part of which is a kind of dorsal buckler, supporting in front the organs of vision. The eyes are generally eight in number, but are variously grouped, according to the types. Walckenäer, at the beginning of this century, made the disposition of the eyes a criterion of distinction between the genera and species. More recently, some remarkable coincidences having been noticed between the disposition of the eyes and the habits of the species, it became recognized that that feature could be relied upon in an animal wholly a stranger to determine the conditions of its existence and the way it got its living.