Word: victim
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Australia and Africa there are spiders that catch their victims by a sort of combination lasso and harpoon. They attach a drop of sticky gum to a length of silky thread, and whirl this apparatus around their heads. When something edible approaches, the spider slings the globule. If it hits, it sticks, and the spider reels in the victim-playing it, if necessary, as a human angler does a fish...
When the web is completed, Aranea runs a silken "telephone line" to her nearby lair, and waits for prey. The slightest vibration of the web brings her out on the run. If the victim is a fly or some other small and harmless insect, she drinks its blood on the spot, or paralyzes it with poison from her fangs and takes it to her lair to be kept in storage. If the catch is a big, vigorous, dangerous intruder (a honeybee or a grasshopper), the spider turns her back and squirts out silk in a broad band from...
Frightened Cardinal. Not many kinds of spider kill as elegantly as Aranea. One called Agelena makes a heavy sheet web that she spreads out on a bush or hedge, where it looks like a flimsy, dirty handkerchief. Agelena has no glue, and she must subdue her victim before he breaks loose. This involves violent battles and considerable risk every time she tackles something that can fight. But Agelena is a big spider (her body is three-quarters of an inch long), and she has an advantage which one arachnologist has neatly compared to that of a man on skis chasing...
...trial at which he hears himself convicted by false testimony he cannot refute because of his even greater fear of the truth. After a last-minute escape to a miserable outlaw camp in the wilderness of Kentucky, he comes to the final, crushing discovery that he has been the victim of a plot by his political cronies...
...groups, among them a group of Penn State teachers which formally organized on May 2 to "work for the re-appointment of Dr. Lorch." Lorch says his second dismissal has set off a considerable amount of comment in the Negro press. "I seem to be regarded as a white victim of jimcrowism...