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Marius comments on Being a teacher - Less Wrong
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I think it would be because it's a "brown spider" more than a "big spider", i.e. "brown" would be more important/more permanent/more "fundamental" in describing it than "big".
That would explain why you would say a "sad little boy" and "short sad song" ("little boy" and "sad song" being "closer" descriptions of the object in question than if the order was reversed).
I'm not sure that's the full story though (the explanations on grammar we come up with are often wrong ), and don't know the "proper" linguistic explanation.
Surely the size of the spider is often the most fundamental aspect? "Don't look now, but there's a huge brown spider behind you." If "big spider" were a species then it's inseparable (as benelliott points out) because it's a species name, but that's a different story. I wouldn't talk about a green enormous chameleon even if I knew that the chameleon was about to change colors without changing its size.