Democratic Sentinel, Volume 14, Number 47, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 December 1890 — Most Famous of Wolf Spiders. [ARTICLE]

Most Famous of Wolf Spiders.

The most famous of all the wolf spiders is the tarantula of Europe, about which the most extraordinary stories are told by the early writers, many of-which still cling to every spider which can be called a tarantula, thus causing the unfortunate animals to bear a much worse name than even they deserve. As a fact, the bite of the tarantula is painful, but not dangerous, yet i't was fully believed to be the cause of a sort of hysterical dancing mania which appeared in epidemic form in Italy in the fourteenth century, and spread all over the country, reaching its height in the next century, after which it died out