Do the young spiders build their first nest by instinct—that is to say, independently of all teaching or personal experience—or do they copy the nests in which they were hatched?
What is wanting, however, is not discussion, of which we have had enough, but demonstration, and demonstration is hard to come by, depending as it must upon careful and repeated experiment.
If it were practicable, and I have no reason to know that it is not, to rear spiders from the egg away from the nest, and then to cause them to build in places where they should be perfectly at home and yet cut off from all communication with their kind, we might hope to learn whether they can construct the characteristic nests of their species without ever having seen one.
Mr. Wallace[1] shows that there is some reason to doubt whether birds, which are so frequently said to build by instinct, would, under parallel circumstances, construct the nest proper to their kind; and he states that birds brought up from the egg in cages do not do so, nor do they even sing their parents' song without being taught.
Of course we can scarcely compare birds and spiders together, but we should hesitate, in view of Mr. Wallace's expressed opinion as to the nest-building habits of the former, to assume that the latter are independent of teaching and personal experience. It may very possibly be so, but it has never been proved.
I have endeavoured to gather together all the pub-*
- ↑ Chapters on Instinct and on the Philosophy of Birds' Nests, in his Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection.
