having a penchant for devouring the lovers they
do not espouse, wooing is invested with dangers
and difficulties. This much is certain, that without
a decree of judicial separation the sexes live
apart. The number of eggs found in the cocoon,
is said to be from thirty to forty.

The female Atypus is about two-fifths of an
inch long. The legs and feelers are provided
with hair and spines, and the colour of these
parts is reddish-brown, the abdomen being egg-
shaped, sparingly clothed with hairs, glossy, and
of a dark brown colour, faintly tinged with red.
The male is smaller and darker than the female.
His palpi, or feelers, are globose at the base, and
are of fine red colour.

Although the British tunnel-spider is as yet
but little known, there are, it is clear, considerable
differences between the British and the
foreign species. The species found near London,
Exeter, Carlisle, and Hastings seems to insert a
scabbard into an excavation, but the species
found in the vicinity of the Mediterranean is
called a mason-spider, because she makes a
tube of clay. This tube undoubtedly resembles
more the work of the potter than of the mason.
There is a wasp which is properly enough called
the mason-wasp, because it cements sands
together, and builds up the fabric of a nest in
this way. But the tunnel of this subterranean
spider has more resemblance to pottery than to
masonry; and if this circumstance is to decide
the name, the animal ought to be called, not the
mason, but the potter-spider. This clay tube,
which is quite distinct from the silken lining, or
sheath, is a finer specimen of pottery than the
prettiest tiny flower-pot ever seen. The silken
lining is more delicate than the finger of the
finest silk glove; and the lid is a marvellous
thing. It is about the size of a coat-button.
The outside of this round button-like lid is
made of clay, baked hard and made smooth,
and the tapering inside consists of layers, or
coatings, of silk, adhering firmly to the clay.
It is attached to the tube by a hinge, elastic
enough to spring open of itself. The innermost
lining of the lid is perforated by a circle of little
holes, which, communicating with the edge of
the lid, forms a first-rate ventilating apparatus.
When the birds which are the enemies of the
potter-spider try with their beaks and claws to
prize open this lid to pull the inhabitant of the
tube out of her home and eat her, she fastens
her claws, which are provided with fine hooks
on purpose, into the silken sides of the scabbard,
pressing against the walls of the tube all
the while, with all her might, and holding fast
the lining of the lid with her pincers for dear
life. But her strength would be of no avail if
the air-holes did not enable her to endure a long
siege, by allowing the escape of the carbonic gas,
or the foul air rejected in respiration. The lid,
however, is at once hinged, waterproof, and
ventilating; and the genius of man has not yet
put upon his head, it may be frankly affirmed, a
hat ventilated so ingeniously as the door of the
tunnel of this spider. I have had living specimens
of this spider in my hand, and they did
not attempt to apply their fangs to my flesh, but
crawled about gently enough, the hooks of
their claws being peculiarly irritating to the skin
of my fingers. The larger species of the tropics,
and especially the black kind of South America,
being large and fierce, large as crabs and fierce
as scorpions, are renowned as venomous.

But not merely are there aerial, aquatic, and
subterranean spiders, there are spiders living
socially and spinning webs in communities of silk
weavers, working in factories, in fact, deep down
in coal mines. These spider factories were
discovered in the Pelton colliery, near Chester-le-
Street, in the county of Durham. The gallery
in which they live is three hundred and twenty
feet deep. Their webs were at first supposed to
be the production of fungi. Seventy horses and
ponies working in the mine, it is supposed that
the spiders were in the first instance carried
down with the fodder for the horses. The moths
carried down amongst the grass and hay in the
eggs and pupa state would supply them with
food, and their webs are constructed to catch
the moths. When the Grand-Duke, afterwards
the Emperor Nicholas, was at Wallsend, he
equipped himself in a proper miner's suit, being
resolved to descend a coal mine, and see the
wonders of the bowels of the earth. Nevertheless,
on arriving at the mouth of the pit, and
staring down into the darkness below, his
courage failed him, and turning away, he exclaimed,
"Mon Dieu, c'est la bouche d'enfer!" The
present Isabella, Queen of Spain, and the Prince
of Wales, are the only royal personages, I believe,
who ever ventured down into the depths
and the darkness of a coal mine. Yet moths
and spiders live in them. The galleries in
which they were found were galleries seldom
used, and through which very little air passes.
Mr. Morrison, who made known the existence
of these spiders, says in one of his letters:

"On passing through the portion of our
underground workings, last night, in which these
webs abound, I observed that the gaps I had
made in the webs in 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."

Mr. Meade of Bradford to whom the spider
was sent for identification pronounced it to be
Nereine errans, a species which had hitherto
been only occasionally found in the fields of
Lancashire, and North Wales. Mr. Stainton,
from the scales of the small moths, found in
the webs believed them to be Tivida or clothes
moths. Nereine errans is a yellowish-brown
spider about an eighth of an inch long. The
web the spiders spin is a genuine and strongish
cobweb, much blackened with coal-dust. It is
no wonder, if when this revelation of spider life
in the coal galleries, was first made known, the
statements were received with some scepticism;
but they have been far surpassed by the news
from Australia of caterpillars, with sixteen feet,
found in a room containing a quantity of shelled
maize. This verandah room with plastered walls,