5620 Arachnida. 



Blackwall. In some bushes near the swamp I captured two speci- 

 mens of Epeira scalaris, one of the largest and most showy of our 

 British spiders : neither of them was quite fully grown, and they were 

 each of them concealed, near their webs, in the middle of a folded 

 leaf, one having selected a leaf of Tamus communis. 



On my way back to lunch, having now been out four or five hours 

 in a hot sun, I noticed an adult male of Philodromus cespiticollis 

 hunting about with great agility on the trunk of a large elm tree, and 

 after some trouble I managed to secure him. 



During another walk which I took in the afternoon the only object 

 of interest which I noticed was a female of Lycosa saccata carrying 

 its young in a mass upon its back, and also retaining the empty 

 cocoon attached to its spinners, which is generally detached as soon 

 as the eggs are hatched and the young leave it. 



On the following day I examined some of the country near 

 Bicester, but met with very few interesting spiders, with the excep- 

 tion of a pair (male and female) of very strongly marked specimens 

 of Salticus frontalis, a pretty little species, which appears to be gene- 

 rally distributed in England, though it is not very common. 



During my walk I was much interested by watching a colony of 

 wild bees, which had constructed a number of circular burrows in a 

 mud wall by the side of a farmyard. I noticed three different kinds, 

 some of them busily chasing each other, and all of them going in and 

 out of the same holes. I captured several of each kind ; and on sub- 

 mitting them to Mr. F. Smith, of the British Museum, he kindly 

 named them for me, when I found two of them to be the male and 

 female of Anlhophora acervorum, the sexes of which greatly differ in 

 appearance ; and the third was Osmia rufa, a species evidently para- 

 sitic upon the former. 



Among the other objects of Natural History which fell in my way 

 (besides spiders) on this occasion was a small fish, which I noticed in 

 a pool of water by the roadside. On capturing it in a little hand-net 

 I found that it was a ten-spined stickleback, a species which I had 

 never seen in the North of England. I carried it home with me in a 

 wide-mouthed bottle, and kept it alive between two and three months 

 in a large fresh-water aquarium, where it became so tame that it 

 would leap three or four inches out of the water to take anything from 

 my hand. 



On the third and last day of my excursion my friend took me to a 

 large piece of waste or forest land in the neighbourhood, covered with 

 scrub or brushwood, called Mixbury Wild, which he thought would 



