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Title
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A Pair of Spiderlings
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Date
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1898
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Creator
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Elizabeth Van Sant
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Rights
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To inquire about usage, please contact Archives & Special Collections, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries. These images are for educational use only. Not all images are available for publication.
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extracted text
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us that Micawber was a lady, and what 0 name! Something must
be done, so we changed it towica.®
in October I discov-
one afternoon during the first we:
ered ice hanging by her spinnerets fron the upper wires of
her cage. The attitude was so unusual for a lycosid that I |
Jooked a second time, and found that she was in the act of
easting off her skin, It was already loose on the upper part
of her body and pushed back to the end of ner abdomen, and
she wes just preparing to froe her legs. She began by drawing
then up close under hor body and relaxing them about once in
fifteen seconds, After three or four mimutes I could see
that the joints nearest the body wore beginning to appear,
She then changod her motion, working the legs in pairs in reg=
ular order, beginning at tho front, and pausing a monent after
each pull. The palps wore the first to come free, and she
used them for pushing away tho old skin, Then the front pair
of legs emerged, and from that tine there was no regularity
of movoment; simply a pushing and pulling here and there, It
took her just ten minutes to free her legs; at the end of her
effort sho was apparently exhausted, and hung for several min-
utes perfectly limp. She then began to draw up one leg after
another, as if to see that ali were in working order before
returning to the bottom of the cage. I undertook to remove
the old skin from the wires where it still nung, but ica pro-
tested vigorously, seizing it and breaking it badly before
she would let go.
During the sumer and fail Robinson changed his skin
