314 AMERICAN SPIDERS AND THEIR SPINNINGWORK. 
The same aranead, when building on the seashore, will show intelligent 
adaptation in the use of the material at hand. I have often found her 
burrow, when dug within the sand, with a course or two of small quartz 
pebbles laid around the rim, upon which, as a sort of foundation, the usual 
chimney or turret of straws would be raised. 
If one will thrust a twig down the burrow, which goes straight down- 
ward six, eight, or ten inches, and will dig away the sand on either side, 
he will see the delicate silken lining-of the burrow clinging to the twig, 
as shown at Fig. 290. It is a delicate fabric, with whose strands the 
i grains of sand are interblend- 
ed. But it serves, in part, to 
keep the tube intact. 
Lycosa carolinensis con- 
structs from the needle like 
leaves of the white pine (as 
in the cut Fig. 291), or from 
other available material, by 
bending and pasting, domi- 
ciles which more closely re- 
semble birds’ nests than any- 
thing that I have met in ara- 
nead architecture. These are 
pasted together by a process 
not unlike a rude sort of 
basket weaving. In this case, 
also, one must assume a delib- 
erate and intelligent action on 
the part of the spider. 
The selection of the pine 
needles as they lie scattered 
over the field; 
sag bringing them to 
the nest site; ar- 
ranging them in the little fascicule or bundles which may be seen in the 
cut (Fig. 291); the bending of these into place to form the basket like 
vestibule or dome above the burrow—all these actions, not to speak of 
others, imply a process of selection and adaptation more or less deliberate 
and intelligent.? 
On the contrary, in studying the nests of Orbweavers and noting their 
manner of constructing them, one cannot escape the conviction that chance 
has had quite as much to do as design in the outcome of some of the 
beautiful forms illustrated in the foregoing chapter. It is in the act of 
Fic. 289, The Turret spider’s nest. The earth is represented 
cut away, to show the burrow. Weaver. 
1 The nest of Carolinensis from which the figure has been drawn was contributed to 
my collection by Mrs. Treat, and was made by a New England spider. 
