SOME ARACHNIDS AT HANOVER, CAPE COLONY. 159 



rim, in which she deposits her eggs, heaped up. She then makes a 

 similar cup which she inverts over them, after which she encloses 

 the eggs between them by soldering them together round the rims. 

 The whole ball of eggs is then spun over with whity-brown silk and 

 attached to the spinners at the end of the abdomen, to be carried about 

 till the young emerge, which crawl out and on to the mother's back, 

 where they remain in a great cluster and are carried about by her for 

 several weeks. She presents an odd spectacle as she rushes about with 

 her numerous progeny on her back. 



The Lycosidse as a family are rovers and do not make regular nests, 

 and this is why the females carry first the egg sacks and then the 

 young about with them. But it is interesting to note that the habit 

 of attaching the egg sack to the spinners (and no doubt also of carry- 

 ing the young about) persists in the projecting- tube builder and in 

 the trap-door species, although the paramount necessity for doing 

 so apparently no longer exists. 



The female Lycosa is said to be often curiously dainty about the 

 color of the silk she uses for the inner cup; it is frequently of some 

 bright color, say orange, while the rims are cemented with silk of 

 some other gay color, say bright green. Sometimes she uses as many 

 as four different colors. But, after all this trouble, she has to cover 

 up her gaudy and attractive cocoon with some dull-covered silk, so 

 as not to attract the notice of flies and wasps on the lookout for a 

 nest of fat eggs in which to deposit an egg or two of their own. 



My finds in Eresidse cover five species. Several of them, belonging 

 to Eresus and Dresserus, found under stones in dense tangles of web, 

 are very slow in their movement and feign death when exposed; one 

 of them is a large creature with an abdomen nearly an inch long and 

 half an inch broad, resembling a huge cattle tick in shape and color 

 (a brownish or bluish slate), even to the puncture-like marks on the 

 back. Of the other species, one is Stegodyphus; you may see their 

 dense ball-like yellow nests on the karoo bushes, with powerful strands 

 binding them in all directions. At least one species of Stegodyphus 

 is social, but the local form lives solitary or in pairs. 



Another is perhaps the most interesting Hanover find. A neigh- 

 boring Dutch farmer (who carefully obtains the Latin name of every 

 species he brings, and who has been a most useful contributor) asked 

 me if I knew of a small 'licht bruin' (light brown) spider that made 

 a double door. Neither I nor any one else, so far as I know, had ever 

 heard of such a thing. But my friend was not far wrong. Where 

 there are ijzer-kopjes (kopjes of dolerite boulders) there are generally, 

 somewhere on the gentle slopes of the flat at the foot, patches of 

 gritty red sand, composed largely of the disintegrated dolerite. The 



