152 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



burrows, which sometimes end in a hole or a cup-like depression in 

 the ground and are beautifully lined with soft, white silk. Very large 

 spiders are nearly always under large heavy stones; one might almost 

 say that the size of the stone varies as the size of the spider. They 

 prefer the stones on the flats or rands or the boulders at the foot of 

 the kopjes. Occasionally they sink a hole an inch and a half in 

 diameter in the open karoo soil and spin strands of web across its 

 mouth. In one such hole I dug up an adult female with her num- 

 erous young, and it was a curious sight to see the young swarming over 

 the great spider. The hole dropped perpendicularly for about six 

 inches and ran at right angles for another foot. The lairs of these 

 spiders are always strewn with bodies of beetles, large and small, 

 eloquent evidences of the sad tragedies that are enacted in insect life. 

 The new Harpactira is common at Hanover, though one does not often 

 find really fine examples of adults. The adult males are rarer than the 

 females, from which they may be distinguished by their slighter bodies 

 and longer legs and by a peculiar pear-shaped spine at the ends of 

 the palps. 



We now come to the regular trap-door spiders, the Ctenizidse, that 

 sink a cylindrical silk-lined tube into the earth and affix a hinged lid 

 to the opening. Of these I have found seven species, all of them, 

 I believe, new. Perhaps the greatest interest gathers round a new 

 Hermachastes. At Cape Town, the representative of this genus has 

 hitherto invariably been found by Dr. Purcell with a trap-door to its 

 hole, but the Hanover species has made a new departure. I have dug 

 up over a hundred, I should think, and have never yet found one with 

 a door. Some have escape blind side chambers, but I have been 

 unable to find a door, either inside or outside. On the contrary, they 

 have the uniform habit of building up a tube with irregular rim, pro- 

 jecting above the ground and varying in height from being just per- 

 ceptible to a perpendicular regularly cylindrical funnel about an inch 

 and a half high, the average height being more than half an inch. 

 These projecting tubes are built of leaves, pieces of grass or small 

 sticks, and are bound together and lined inside with white web, which 

 extends throughout the length of the underground hole. This habit, 

 as far as regular trap-door spiders are concerned, was, up to this dis- 

 covery, quite unknown in South Africa; though I believe there are 

 trap-door spiders in northern Africa which apparently build a similar 

 projecting tube. I have not yet found the adult male of this 

 Hermachastes, which probably lives under stones by day a habit com- 

 mon to the males of this family; but the making of the nest as 

 described has been established with regard to adult females, males up 

 to the last molt, and the young of both sexes. 



