ANCESTRAL SPIDERS AND THEIR HABITS. 



469 



One might well be excused for giving liis imagination some i)lay in 

 depicting the strange mutations of these creatures of the amber forests. 

 But tlie simple truth seems fanciful enough. Their life in those fragrant 

 woods of the Tertiary, along the islands and shores of the ancient Tertiary 

 sea ; their swift entombment within the aromatic lialsam ; their long repose 

 within the soil of the ancient forests ; the convulsions by which they were 

 sunk deep within the sea, and their recovery again to the surface; their final 

 repose in the deep bed of the Baltic Sea, after the recurring depressions 

 and elevations had ceased ; in some cases, at teast, their settlement and 

 subsidence, after drifting here and there, 

 attached to broken and decayed trunks and 

 roots, the sport of waves and currents of 

 the ocean ; their long, long sleep under- 

 neath deep sea waves, while the marvelous 

 changes that have made our present world 

 were being wrouglit out ; their rupture from 

 their rest of milleniads by the grinding 

 force of winter storms ; their drifting be- 

 fore the force of breaking waves upon the 

 shores of Samland ; their capture by the 

 fishermen and amber strikers of Germany; 

 their cutting, shaping, and polisliing in 

 the hands of lapidaries ; their transit from hand to hand among venders 

 and merchants ; their resting place in cabinets of entomologists, collectors, 

 and scientific societies; their voyage from country to country, 

 and once more upon the sea ; their lodgment here beneath the 

 curious eye and lens of the writer, who studies them and depicts 

 their forms for science as they rest embalmed in their amber sarcophagus — 

 all this is certainly a picture upon which fancy might fondly dwell. It 

 reads like a romancer's tale ; yet the story, nevertheless, presents no merely 

 fanciful features, but, in good sooth, is all within the realm of sober facts 

 which naturalists have disclosed. 



Vui. 401. Arachea paradoxa ; male. 

 (After Bereudt.) 



Resur 

 g-am. 



THE END. 



