INSECT ODDITIES. 259 



The writer availed himself of the opportunity of submitting these and other 

 spider sketches to Messrs. E. J. Pocock and F. O. Pickard Cambridge, the Arachnid 

 Authorities at the British Museum. While it was not found possible to establish the 

 identity of the spider just described and figured, it being probably new to science, 

 some interesting data were elicited concerning its characteristic cocoons. Examples 

 of these fabrications had, it appeared, been acquired by the Museum Collection 

 between fifty and sixty years ago. Up to the present time, however, no data were 

 available indicating what description of spider or other insect constructed them. In 

 another form included in the author's sketch book, the egg cocoons were perfectly 

 spherical, half an inch in diameter, smooth on their surface, and of a light-brown 

 tint with darker striations. The contour and size of these egg cocoons so nearly 

 coincided in contour and dimensions with the seed capsules of the indigenous 

 convolvulus, Ipomea, that they might be easily mistaken for such a vegetable structure. 

 The spider, moreover, when at rest with legs doubled close to its body, so closely 

 resembles the egg cocoons in shape and markings, though of lighter colour, that it 

 too might be taken for an older, bleached and battered example of the same seed 

 vessel. Samples of these egg cocoons were also contained in the British Museum 

 Collection, but without any record as to their relationship. The writer's included 

 sketch of the spider sufficed for its identification with Koch's figure of Celamia 

 excamta, so that the organism and its products are now satisfactorily correlated 

 with one another. 



The Spider form represented by Figs. 7 and 8 of the Plate now under notice, 

 is referable to the genus Argyrodes, and is remarkable for the circumstance that it 

 does not spin and abide in an independent web, but takes up its residence on the 

 snare woven by some larger and stronger species, preying there on the smaller 

 midget-sized flies and other insects that are beneath the notice of its accommodating 

 host. The form here figured was most abundantly observed by the writer com- 

 mensally associated on the wide-spreading geometrical webs of the relatively 

 gigantic spider Nephila fuscipes, in Cape York Peninsula, North Queensland, of 

 which a figure is given in Plate XLV. An identical or very closely allied species 

 was also abundant on the webs of Argiope regalis, in the neighbourhood of Brisbane. 

 One of the most remarkable features of this type is its burnished silver-like sheen. 

 Scattered in some numbers over the surface of the web as they frequently are, 

 and of all ages and sizes, from almost invisible pin-points to the adult dimen- 

 sions of about one-eighth of an inch in diameter, they glisten in the sun like minute 



