304 THOS. H. MONTGOMERY, JR. 



others on the ninth of March, and kept isolated in glass cases, 

 with fairly rich feeding, until June 12. All of these when caught 

 showed the epigyna small and imperfect and this fact, in connec- 

 tion with the observation that few of the males at that time of the 

 year were mature, made it certain that all the females were vir- 

 ginal. All underwent moults during captivity, one moulted 

 twice, the others only once ; after moulting all but four made 

 cocoons containing eggs. Eleven of the spiders made one co- 

 coon each, seven made two cocoons each, and one made three 

 cocoons. Of the total of twenty-eight cocoons, eleven were de- 

 stroyed by the spiders shortly after their construction, the mothers 

 eating the eggs, and most of these cocoons were very imperfect ; 

 while the remaining seventeen were removed from the mothers 

 immediately after their completion to save them from such possible 

 demolition, handled as gently as possible, and kept in separate 

 bottles to test their fecundity. But not one of the eggs in any 

 of these seventeen cocoons hatched, nor even reached the stage 

 of the early blastoderm ; one batch of eggs was fixed at the age 

 of twenty-four hours, but on examination showed no cleavage 

 nuclei near the surface, so they had certainly not reached the 

 sixteen-cell stage. All these eggs were shrivelled and dry. 



Therefore virginal females of Lycosa relncens form cocoons 

 with eggs in them, but these eggs do not develop. And such 

 females show always more or less imperfect construction of the 

 cocoons and the tendency to eat the eggs ; in mature individuals 

 of Lycosa that I have bred in captivity, the eggs always developed, 

 and the mother rarely ate the eggs. 



My observations corroborate those of Blackwall and Blanchard, 

 and in the species watched by us normal parthenogenesis seems 

 not to occur ; on the other hand, there are the two positive cases 

 of its occurrence mentioned by Campbell and Damin. Certainly 

 parthenogenesis is exceptional in spiders. 



