Giui1es.—On the Habits of the Trap-door Spider. 241 
ground, and is covered with clay into which grassis woven. Itis thickened 
at the back, and has a great spring, and the mouth of the nest is beveled in 
front to which the door fits exactly. 
No. 16, is also a flat clay-covered one with some roots woven into it, 
but the lip of the trap-door is so adroitly made to simulate a crack in the 
ground, as to diminish the chances of its being taken for the mouth of the 
nest. No. 24, too, has a lump of clay on its top, and on this is impressed 
an evidently, artificial crack, so as to distract attention from the real mouth 
of the tube. Unfortunately, however, this which was a very interesting 
specimen, has got broken in the carriage. 
Trap-door No. 80 was a very neat one, thick in the centre, without any 
apparent tiling, well-lined inside, and on the outside planted in the most 
artistic fashion with small mosses and lichens and minute herbage, exactly 
the same as the adjoining ground. It is the trap-door of nest No. 6, and, 
unfortunately, got broken off in the journey down to Dunedin. The nest 
itself, with the spider in it and a number of young ones, stood the journey 
well, and I had them alive for some time, as I shall relate further on ; but 
the trap-door soon lost all its beauty ; still, as I have it in a phial, it is easy 
to hand round, and you will still see the remains of the various plants on it, 
and you will be able to understand that, when it was fresh and green, it was 
really a minutely-beautiful object from the thickness of its coating of plants, 
and the exquisite variety and gayness of their colouring. 
No. 9 never could have been discovered by any amount of search, if acci- 
dent had not revealed it. I had occasion to pare off some grass tussocks 
from a piece of ground, when a stroke of the spade showed a hole of about 
half-an-inch in diameter, going down into the ground. I immediately 
searched the grass tussock; but even then I could not find it on the sur- 
face, and it was not till I took a stick, and pushed it up the hole from the 
under side of the sod, that the exact position of the trap-door became 
apparent. You will see it is in the middle of a high grass tussock, and part 
of the tussock was growing on and around it, and over the rest of it was 
strewed the débris of dead and decaying grass and ferns, similar to what 
you will always see lying about the roots of such tussocks. It is now very 
much destroyed, through packing in a box and carrying so far; but when 
got it was one of the most valuable specimens of the whole lot. 
_ No, 14 is also a little gem. The herbage is thick and close on the sur- 
face of the sod ; but there is not the faintest trace of the soil and clay that 
must have been excavated from the hole to be seen near it. The ingeniously 
artistic, and yet natural way in which the grasses, ferns, mosses, seeds, ete., 
are arranged on the lid, and are made to correspond with those around, 
challenges detection, and excites our admiration. What ees the in- 
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