Giti1es.—On the Habits of the Trap-door Spider. 237 
veronicas and white berry plants are introduced to correspond with the 
the bolder herbage around, or, if the common white tussock is the prevail- 
ing vegetation in the locality, and decaying and dead grass is frequent 
amongst the plants, there you will find the same condition repeated on the 
lid, the dead bits of grass being adroitly woven into the trap-door, or round 
its mouth, so as to deceive the most practised eye. So, too, where roots or 
woody fibres, or bits of dead stick are scattered over the ground, or protrude 
from the soil, this clever imitator will repeat the conditions on his lid, weav- 
ing these hard, foreign, and often clumsy materials into his trap-door in an 
irregular and apparently undesigned way. This is specially noticeable on 
bare, burnt, ground, where the herbage is short, and the action of the wind 
and the rain has bared the rootlets of the woody plants, and there, too, you 
will find bits of grass, etc., with the ends blackened and burnt, which the 
fire in passing over has merely scorched, utilised as the similarity of the 
surroundings demand; so, too, hard seeds and anything whatever covering 
the ground are reproduced in their natural attitudes in these clever pieces 
of deception. In fact, you will never find any two trap-doors exactly the 
same, even in any one locality, and belonging to the same colony of spiders, 
except where surface soil or clay simply is the covering. Nor let it be sup- 
posed that the animal simply makes use of the materials found most 
abundantly to his hand, and that long habit has taught him the selection of 
his materials; for, in the case of the mosses and lichens, and it may be 
safely said in the case of all the other materials too—though the proof of it is 
not so apparent—the spider never takes the plants that are growing imme- 
diately around, for that would be the means of drawing attention to the 
neighbourhood ; but the wily creature, with his characteristic craft and 
cunning, selects what will suit some distance, comparatively speaking, from 
the scene of his operations, and brings it to his home and plants it; and 
what shows, too, that this is something more than the unerring fatalism of 
what we are accustomed to call mere instinct, is, that instances are found of 
bad and blundered work of various degress of perfection, and even of laziness 
and neglect. For samples are before you where the nests were in 
rough ground, where the herbage grew thick and close, and where the 
labour of carrying the excavated soil in minute pellets in its little 
hands to some distance away from its nest seems to have been too 
much for the energy of the individual, and consequently its “‘ muck’’ (to 
use a mining phrase) is all deposited in a heap at the mouth of the hole, 
easily drawing attention by its prominent unsightliness ; and yet, in exactly 
the same circumstances, you will find in by far the greater number of cases 
that every particle of soil that would command attention has been carefully 
and scrupulously removed; or, again, as showing that it is not mere instinet 
