Arachnid a. 7149 



a minute creature to fabricate such immense sheets of web as were 

 described, and was even doubtful whether they were animal pro- 

 ductions at all, not having had an opportunity of examining them. 

 I expressed these doubts to Mr. Stainton, and said at the same time 

 that the latter point might easily be settled by looking at some of the 

 so-called web with the microscope. 



Shortly after this I had the pleasure of hearing from Mr. Morison 

 himself, who sent me a living specimen of the spider, and a portion of 

 web wound round a piece of wood. I immediately found that this 

 was genuine spider's web, which had become much blackened by 

 coal-dust; and adhering to it were numerous minute scales from the 

 wings of small moths (Tineidae ?), which had evidently been the food 

 of the spiders. The spider itself was an adult specimen of Neriene 

 errans, a small species which had been described by Mr. Blackwall 

 in the ' Linnean Transactions' (vol. xviii. p. 643), and hitherto had 

 only been found by him occasionally in the fields in Lancashire and 

 North Wales. To be quite certain regarding the identity of the spe- 

 cies I obtained several more specimens from Mr. Morison, comprising 

 both adult males and females, and submitted some of them to Mr. 

 Blackwall for his opinion, which coincided with my own. They 

 slightly differed in colour from the ordinary above-ground specimens 

 of Neriene errans, being of a more dusky tint, but that was probably 

 owing to the dark nature of the locality in which they had lived. 

 Mr. Morison stated to me that the pit (named the Pelton Colliery) in 

 which these spiders were found is 320 feet below the surface of the 

 ground, and also that seventy-five horses and ponies are employed in 

 it. He suggests that the insects upon which the spiders live are pro- 

 bably introduced with the fodder for the horses ; and perhaps the 

 spiders themselves were taken down in the first instance in the same 

 manner. 



The spiders are met with in the portions of the pit which are not 

 at present being worked, and the webs are generally spun in galleries, 

 through which little or no air passes. When a rent has been made 

 in one of the webs, the little spiders may be counted by scores toge- 

 ther, repairing the damage. In one of his letters to me Mr. Morison 

 says, " On passing through the portion of our under-ground workings, 

 last night, in which these webs abound, 1 observed that the gaps I 

 had made in the webs on my last visit to that quarter were being spun 

 over again ; and on one of them I counted twenty-three or twenty- 

 four little spiders busily engaged in mending the rent." 



It is quite a new trait in the character of spiders that a number of 



