78 BULLETIN OF THE LIVERPOOL MUSEUMS. 
much of it even at low tide. I have often gone into the breakers, and have 
nearly been carried away by the strength of the sea, but with a hammer and 
a bar of iron have broken off, from under the sea, portions of the formation ; 
and then, going on shore, have found spiders, in their homes, in the mass, 
when I had broken it to pieces. Sometimes I have found five or six spiders, 
in one piece of material weighing five or six pounds. 
“ Now, what is curious is, that these spiders cannot swim or dive, and when 
placed on the surface of the water appear to be quite helpless, or nearly so. 
I have never seen one make any attempt to navigate itself through water. 
For a long time I could not get a good specimen of their dwellings ; 
but, with the assistance of a friend, I ey entually succeeded in securing several 
nearly perfect examples. I then saw that the spider did not, as a rule, make 
its home in the empty tubes of the worms, but that it spun it in one of the 
many spaces left between the tubes. There is nothing very striking about 
their silken structures. As you break up a mass of tubes, you suddenly come 
across a fine and delicate piece of silk. On examining this you find it to be 
a chamber with an opening sea-ward. It is so frail and delicate that it is 
very difficult to get a complete specimen, and the least rough handling and 
it is gone. Yet in this frail house of silk, hidden away in some little space in 
the mass of tubes built by marine worms, this spider lives and thrives, and 
propagates its species, the waves breaking over it all day long. It cannot 
swim, as I have said ; it is soft and delicate, and, as I have proved, does not 
long survive being kept i in a dry box away from the sea. I have never, but 
on one occasion, found one of these spiders apart from the 7’ ubizola-masses. 
I have watched the tubes, when the tide was low, in the hope of seeing a 
spider crawling or running about, but-I have never yet seen one. They live 
out of sight deep down among the worm tubes. How they catch their food, 
what their food is,and how they keep the sea from drowning them, are 
questions I have not yet demonstrated, though I have tried, again and again, 
to keep them in my marine aquaria. Shortly after introducing one, I have 
often found it floating helplessly on the water, apparently half dead, and I 
have had it lifted out of the water and placed on the rock-work, when it soon 
became active, and ran about very quickly, when it appeared to be just like an 
ordinary spider. I have not had time yet to make an anatomical study of it, 
but I thought I had better not defer sending you a specimen, so that you 
may be, perhaps, the first to receive specimens of the wonderful little spider.” 

