Each week, our brilliant editor at The Wombat Post makes difficult decisions choosing which articles to include in the week’s edition. Is an article Interesting? Appropriate? Of interest to our local readers? Relevant? In the public Interest? He requires the wisdom of Solomon!
No doubt the Editor of The Daylesford Advocate in 1882 was required to make similar judgements. The following article in The Daylesford Advocate on Thursday 16 February 1882 must have satisfied one or more of the requirements as it was included with some prominence!
A SPIDER DRAWS UP A MOUSE BY THE TAIL
A very curious and interesting spectacle was to be seen one afternoon in the office of Mr. P. C. Clever’s livery stable in Lebanon. Against the wall of the room stands a tolerably tall desk, and under this a small spider, not larger than a common pea, had constructed an extensive web reaching to the floor.
In the morning it was observed that the spider had ensnared a young mouse by passing filaments of her web around its tail. When first seen the mouse had its hind feet off the floor and could barely touch the floor with its fore-feet.
The spider was full of business, running up and down the line, occasionally biting the mouse’s tail, making it struggle desperately. Its efforts to escape were unavailing, as the slender filaments around its tail were too strong for it to break. In a short while it was seen that the spider was slowly hoisting its victim into the air.
In the afternoon the mouse could barely touch the floor with its fore-foot; by dark the point of its nose was an inch above the floor. In the evening the mouse was still alive, but had made no sign except when the spider descended and bit its tail. The next morning the mouse was dead, and hung three inches from the floor.
The news of the novel sight soon became circulated and hundreds of people have visited the stable to witness it.
The mouse was a small one, probably less than half-grown, measuring about one inch and a half from the point of its nose to the root of its tail. How the spider succeeded in ensnaring it is not known. The mechanical ingenuity of the spider, which enables her to raise a body which must weigh forty or fifty times as much as herself, has been the subject of a good deal of comment and speculation, and no satisfactory explanation of the difficulty has been found.
All agree that it is a most remarkable case, and one that would be received with utter incredulity if it were not so amply attested.
From the Daylesford and District Historical Society. https://daylesfordmuseum.net/
