7148 Arachnida. 



that spiders delighted in moisture, and were most abundant in wet 

 seasons. 



Having mentioned the British Association, T may perhaps be 

 allowed briefly to allude to a paper which I read at the Leeds 

 Meeting in 1858 (which has since been printed in the ' Reports'), on 

 the Anatomy of the Spinning Organs of Spiders. There had long been 

 a difference of opinion among naturalists as to the power which 

 spiders possessed of shooting out their webs. Some thought that 

 they had the power of propelling a thread from their spinnarets with 

 great force and in any direction, and that it was in this way that the 

 filaments of gossamer are formed, and also that threads are stretched 

 between trees divided by a stream of water. On the contrary, others, 

 among whom I may particularly mention Mr. Blackwall, were of 

 opinion that all floating threads must have been drawn out of the spin- 

 narets by a current of air, the spider only emitting a little viscid fluid, 

 and taking advantage of any breath of air that may arise. On care- 

 fully dissecting the abdominal organs I found that the glandular sacs 

 which secrete the strong threads in question are all furnished with a 

 highly contractible fibrous coat, which also surrounds the ducts con- 

 veying the silky fluid to the spinnarets. This coat bears some resem- 

 blance to the fibrous coat of the arteries in man and the higher 

 animals, and, in my opinion, must enable the spider to eject the fluid 

 forming the threads with considerable violence. 



Rambling on from one subject to another, we now come to a dis- 

 covery which has lately been made in the history of spider life, viz., 

 that a small species lives in large numbers, in a gregarious or social 

 state, in the deep subterranean galleries of some of our northern col- 

 lieries, where it spins extensive sheets of web. The existence of 

 masses of web-like tissue has long been known in these localities, and 

 has before attracted the attention of naturalists ; but though these 

 masses have been suspected by some to be the production of spiders, 

 they have generally been looked upon as the mycelia or filamentous 

 portions of Fungi. In the beginning of February last, however, I 

 received a small spider from Mr. Stainton, with the request that I 

 would determine its name. It had been sent to him by Mr. Morison, 

 of Pelton Colliery, Chester-le-Street, Durham, with the information 

 that it was the fabricator of the webs in question. The spider which 

 I received was not quite an eighth of an inch in length, of a yellowish 

 brown colour, and had become dry and shrivelled. It belonged to 

 the genus Neriene, but in its dried state it was impossible to deter- 

 mine its specific name. I was very sceptical as to the power of such 



