. INSECT ODDITIES. 259 
The writer availed himself of the opportunity of submitting these and other 
spider sketches to Messrs. R. J. Pocock and F. O. Pickard Cambridge, the Arachnid 
Authorities at the British Museum. While it was not found possible to establish the 
identity of the spider just described and figured, it being probably new to science, 
some interesting data were elicited concerning its characteristic cocoons. Examples 
of these fabrications had, it appeared, been acquired by the Museum Collection 
between fifty and sixty years ago. Up to the present time, however, no data were 
available indicating what description of spider or other insect constructed them. In 
another form included in the author’s sketch book, the egg cocoons were perfectly 
spherical, half an inch in diameter, smooth on their surface, and of a light-brown 
tint with darker striations. The contour and size of these egg cocoons so nearly 
coincided in contour and dimensions with the seed capsules of the indigenous 
convolvulus, Ipomea, that they might be easily mistaken for such a vegetable structure. 
The spider, moreover, when at rest with legs doubled close to its body, so closely 
resembles the egg cocoons in shape and markings, though of lighter colour, that it 
too might be taken for an older, bleached and battered example of the same seed 
vessel. Samples of these egg cocoons were also contained in the British Museum 
Collection, but without any record as to their relationship. The writer’s included 
sketch of the spider sufficed for its identification with Koch’s figure of Célenia 
excavata, so that the organism and its products are now satisfactorily correlated 
with one another. 
The Spider form represented by Figs. 7 and 8 of the Plate now under notice, 
is referable to the genus Argyrodes, and is remarkable for the circumstance that it 
does not spin and abide in an independent web, but takes up its residence on the 
snare woven by some larger and stronger species, preying there on the smaller 
midget-sized flies and other insects that are beneath the notice of its accommodating 
host. The form here figured was most abundantly observed by the writer com- 
mensally associated on the wide-spreading geometrical webs of the relatively 
gigantic spider Nephila fuscipes, in Cape York Peninsula, North Queensland, of 
which a figure is given in Plate XLV. An identical or very closely allied species 
was also abundant on the webs of Argiope regalis, in the neighbourhood of Brisbane. 
One of the most remarkable features of this type is its burnished silver-like sheen. 
Scattered in some numbers over the surface of the web as they frequently are, 
and of all ages and sizes, from almost. invisible pin-points to the adult dimen- 
sions of about one-eighth of an inch in diameter, they glisten in the sun like minute 
