THE AUSTRALIAN NATURALIST. 65 
at the Australian Museum, and had proved so interesting 
that it was decided to repeat it at one of the monthly 
meetings of the Naturalists’ Society. On the evening re- 
ferred to there was a large attendance of members, and 
the lecture, which was listened to most attentively, was 
illustrated by a series of upwards of fifty beautiful lan- 
tern. slides. 
In a state of Nature there are no animals that fall 
more generally under observation than spiders, nor are 
there any less perfectly understood. It is usually the cus- 
tom for that mythical yet paradoxically ubiquitous person, 
'‘*the man_in the street,’’ to regard spiders not only as 
uncanny, but even ugly and dangerous! It is true that the 
form and colour of many species fail to appeal to the of- 
ten so-called aesthetic mind, nevertheless there are hun- 
dreds of species that are not only pretty, but even abso- 
lutely beautiful, and among the latter there are some that 
rival the gaily painted butterflies. To the true naturalist, 
nothing in Nature is really ugly; everything has some 
beauty, some charm, and if the naked eye fails to dis- 
cover it, the microscope soon reveals the fact. That 
spiders are dangerous is an old fable, and it is about time 
it was dead and decently buried. The common house-fly, 
which John Ruskin declared to be the ‘‘queen of the air,’’ 
is unquestionably a real danger to man; but the much 
maligned spider, on the other hand, is not only not danger- 
ous, but a useful ally to man, as it destroys hosts of the 
baneful Musca domestica, as well as other noxious insects. 
Mr. Rainbow gave a general outline of the great order 
Araneidx, and their web-building habits, and demonstrated 
by the aid of the lantern many different types of snares, 
such as the orb-webs of the common garden spider, the 
beautiful snare of Argiope altherea, with its St. Andrew 
cross design at the centre, and which gives it the popular 
name of ‘‘St. Andrew Cross Spider’’; the beautifully- 
decorated webs of spiders of the genus Uloborus; and the 
complicated and ‘‘compound’’ structures of certain species 
of Araneus. The work of the different types of trap-door 
spiders and turret-builders was also described and illus- 
trated, as were also those of the diving spiders and raft- 
builders. 
The lecture concluded with the description of process 
of ‘‘ballooning,’? a method by which young spiders are 
distributed, and several lantern slides were shown in il- 
lustration of this side of the subject. Young spiders gene- 
rally ‘‘fly’’ off in swarms; indeed, they have occasionally 
