looser sand than the others, and in the middle of the upper 

 half of No. 3 the diameter was only 9.6 mm. No. 5 was occupied 

 by a spider partially grown, but perhaps would have been 

 deeper if a short root of some plant had not lain in the way of 

 any further direct progress. No. 1 was occupied by the female 

 with egg-cluster, and was considerably enlarged at the bottom 

 to allow for the additional burden. The holes are large enough 

 to allow the spider to turn itself around, for a specimen made to 

 enter a hole head foremost was dug out and found head upward. 



Holes were found only two millimetres in diameter at the 

 to}) and coi'respondingly shallow, from a quarter to a half a 

 decimetre deep ; the shallowest, therefore, scarcely reach the 

 moister sand which lies beneath the surface. All the tubes are 

 lined throughout with silk, but this is only apparent in the 

 smallest holes ; the silk is invariably more abundant in the 

 superficial layer of dry soil, where it is doubtless more needed ; 

 examination with a lens shows that it continues to the bottom 

 of the deepest holes also. The portion surrounded by dry 

 sand may, with care, be removed uninjured ; even here, how- 

 ever, the web has no rigidity, and though grains of sand and 

 splinters and fragments of grass-blades adhere to it, it collapses 

 as soon as it is removed, being unable to support its own weight. 

 At the edge of the opening of the tube, little straws and sticks 

 are not infrequently interwoven with the silk, apparently to 

 form a better protection, and, in a road through the woods, I 

 once found a hole, where the entrance w'as marked by a little 

 pile of sticks crossing each other at all angles, but leaving the 

 opening perfectly circular, surrounded by a raised rampart 

 nearly twenty millimetres high. 



In excavating the tubes, I took pains to examine carefully 

 the debris at their bottom, and to remove this until I was sure 

 I had reached the virgin sand. In one I found a matted, soggy 

 mass of insect rem.ains mingled with sand ; among other things 

 I noticed a large-winged locust, apparently a Trimerotropis, a 

 medium-sized Carabid, and a Necrophorus ; in another the only 

 recognizable object was the shard of a small lamellicorn beetle ; 

 in a third (a small hole) only a little fly ; in a fourth the re- 

 mains of a Lycosa itself, perhaps fragments of the cast-off skin 



