Giui1es.—On the Habits of the Trap-door Spider. 257 
M. Erber, too, says, ‘I failed to find either the remains of food 
or excrement.” §o0 he had to watch the spiders catching their prey 
by means of a snare in front of their holes, and then he says: ‘After 
sucking out the juices (of beetles) they carried the empty bodies to 
a distance of several feet from their holes.” My experience of the 
Oamaru species is, that, amongst the scores of nests that I have ex- 
amined, there was scarcely one but had masses of refuse, food, and 
animal matter in the bottom of the holes. In some nests this was in the 
form of a little ball of legs, wings, scales, and plates of insects (beetles 
especially) all spun together. In others, and by far the greater number, it 
was in the form of a perfect mass of matter, packed down tight in the 
bottom of the nest, filling up the tube at the lower end, sometimes as 
deep as an inch, as in the nest I brought to Dunedin, or as in the 
specimen of débris from the bottom of a nest now before you, No. 25. 
This mass of matter consisted on the top, of débris of food, legs, wings, and 
elytra of beetles and other insects, such as grasshoppers, and once, the case 
of a chrysalis. Below this, and partly mixed with it, and with an occa- 
sional chitinous wing of a beetle, was always a brown material like 
moss, which the microscope reveals to be animal matter, as well as the 
hardened integuments and epidermis of insects, and the coarse matted 
threads of spiders spun all through it and dried up. In one large nest 
found at the Bobbin there were the remains of many beetles in the bottom 
and also bits of green stuff like bundles of chewed grass. I regret now that 
I did not preserve this ; but my idea at the time was that the brown stuff 
was moss or grass, and was used by the spider as a sort of bed or cushion 
for its young ; but the microscope has since satisfied me that it is not moss, 
but animal matter, and this makes the exceptional green stuff found in this 
one hole all the more peculiar. In one nest, found in autumn by a servant 
of mine, and which had a double branch with a trap-door on the branch 
as described afterwards, there were caterpillars and grasshoppers, in fact 
my informant stated that the side gallery, as I may term it, was stored with 
caterpillars and grasshoppers. John Reid, Esq., of Elderslie, told me that 
he has often seen beetles lift the trap-doors and run in, and his belief was 
that the beetles lived with the spiders; at any rate the rule in Oamaru in 
November is, that there is a large accumulation of refuse food, ete., in the 
bottom of the nests, and Erber’s observations that ‘“ the spiders always 
carry away the empty bodies of beetles to a distance of some feet,”’ do not 
apply here. On the contrary, there is evidence on the other side to show 
that the habit of the Oamaru species is to accumulate its débris and refuse 
food for some time, and then, when its midden gets too bulky, it is all 
cleaned out at once and thrown upon its usual excavation heap. * Two dis- 
