144 THE SOLITARY WASPS. 



getting the legs into a satisfactory state. The details of the 

 condition in which we found them may be interesting. Four 

 spiders retained their full complement of legs but in one of 

 these they had all been badly squeezed, the marks of the man- 

 dibles being plainly visible on the trochanters; one had lost the 

 three distal joints of the third leg on one side; one had lost a 

 leg of the third pair, and two others showed signs of having been 

 bitten; another had lost a leg of the first pair, another one of 

 the second, and still another, one of the fourth, while the most 

 seriously mutilated spider in the series had lost the third and 

 fourth legs on one side. P. fnscipennis was to be seen in our 

 garden from the twenty-first of July until we left the country 

 on September tenth. 



Pompilus calipterus Say. 



It was on the fifth of August that we saw this good sized, 

 dark gray wasp, walking up and down a fence post. A little 

 scrutiny showed that she was carrying pellets of earth from the 

 ground into a hole four feet above, in the wood, and very odd 

 she looked, making this journey again and again on foot instead 

 of using her wings. Upon cutting away the post we found that 

 she was just partitioning off the second apartment in what was 

 doubtless intended to be a long series. Both cells contained 

 female spiders of the species Xystwus ferox, that in the inner 

 one being twice as large as the other, and each spider had an 

 egg on the side of the abdomen. The large one was dead, but 

 the other responded feebly to stimulation and lived in this 

 state for four days. One of the eggs, the one that had just 

 been laid when we opened the nest, hatched at the end of sixty 

 hours, but the larva did not live. 



Pompilus marginatus, Say. 

 Plate I., fig. 1. 



Our acquaintance with this remarkable wasp began in the 

 middle of July. She is a small creature, only half an inch long, 

 and is dressed in black, with a bright orange spot on each side 



