creeping woody brandies, in dull purple clusters,
the black nightshade, snake-like, beautiful and
sinister as poisonous. Appropriately enough,
the only animal I caught was one of the long-
legged oval-bodied running spiders (nearer scorpions
than spiders), which bite and do not spin.
Skirting the bend of a river, I came on the land
side to a steep clay-bank, a hundred feet high,
composed of clay, sand, and gravel. It is
luxuriantly covered with grass, and with occasional
roots of gorse, except where bits of the bank
have slipped down, laying bare the soil, or where
there occur patches of blue clay washed smooth
by the descending rain-water. It is a bank on
which plants and animals can enjoy the sun's
rays almost from his rising in the east until his
going down in the west. While clambering
about on the face of this bank, holding on by
shrubs, I caught glimpses of the twinkling brown
eyes of lizards or efts, and I picked up some
cast-off skins of young adders. And its flora
and fauna matched each other strikingly. The
sharp-eyed botanist could detect a few heads of
the yellow-horned flowers of the bird's-foot
trefoil amidst the green grass; and no observer
could fail to notice the large rose-coloured
flowers of the tree mallow; but the feature of
the flora of the bank was the abundance of the
pale-blue flax with narrow leaves and long slender
stalks stretching themselves straight up as if to
compare their blue with the blue on high. Red
admiral butterflies and nerve-winged burnets
were alighting on the mallow every now and
then, as if to contrast their red and black with
its rose and green, and Clifden-blue butterflies
sporting with each other in the sunshine,
surpassed even the beauty of the flax.

Lorenzo and Jessica did not think the bank
upon which the moonbeams slept, more suitable
for their sweet converse than I deemed this high
sea-bank suitable for searching for tunnelling
spiders. Not a few round little holes in the
smooth clay attracted my attention, but they
contained a caterpillar which fastens itself into
its hole by assuming the form of a capital L.
Strange and large centipedes were aroused from
their sleep by my explorings, and darted away.
Little round balls, shining with a bluish
metallic lustre, reminded me by their size and
form of the smallest marbles I ever played
with in boyhood, soon awoke and deftly
disappeared in the loose dry earth, as chitons or
armadillo woodlice. But none of these were the
objects of my search. I relieved my wearied
eyes by glancing across the rippling water, on
which the sunshine basked, at a solitary horse
which had swam across and was browsing at
liberty. Refreshed by the beauty of the flax
flowers and the contemplation of the picture
formed by one tree mallow in particular, full of
large rose-coloured flowers, on one of which
a burnet reposed, displaying its brightest red
and black, I turned my eyes to scrutinise
the bank once more, and detected an edging of
silk around the mouth of a hole. Looking into
it closely, I could discern, about a couple of
inches down, the silken case of something like a
spider. The eyes of my comrade confirming my
own, I carefully dug out the lump of clay
containing the tunnel and its silken case. I had
found, I doubted not, the nest of one of the
Mygalidæ. After carrying it about a mile on my
way homewards, I obtained a flower-pot, into
which I carefully put the lump of clay, keeping
the tube in its horizontal position. Next morning,
the lump having become cracked and crumbling,
I perceived a flat red spider, about five or
six-eighths of an inch long, peeping out from one
of the cracks.

This spider I recognised to be the Dysdera
erythrina of Latreille. Many specimens of this
spider have been found by British naturalists
with egg-bags and silken tubes under stones,
but they do not appear to have found any in a
clay tube, and hence, have not seen how
correctly it was placed among the Mygalidæ by
Latreille. It so happens, that my acquaintance
with this group of spiders was made in
Paris. All this family of spiders have their
fangs articulated horizontally. There are
naturalists who have separated the Dysdera
erythrina from the Mygalidæ, because although it
has every other characteristic of the order, it has
only six eyes! These six eyes, which can be
discerned by the aid of a first-rate lens, are
arranged in horseshoe fashion, with the opening
in front; but they are not placed where Latreille
incorrectly says, upon a tubercle, but they are
placed in front of the head-chest, above the jaws
and fangs.

A characteristic of these spiders is, that they
can climb upon the smooth sides of a bottle, or
any other dry and highly polished perpendicular
surface. A favourite sleeping posture with them
is feet upwards and back downwards. The
question is puzzling to some folks, why the sticky
globules on the nets of certain spiders hold the
flies without impeding the spiders? The answer
is, that the spiders in question have feet with
hooks, and the flies feet with brushes. But
there are kinds of spiders, the Mygalidæ, for
instance, furnished with tiny brushes, or hair-like
papillæ rather, and they would probably be held
fast as the flies are upon the viscous globules of
the nets of the garden spiders or epëiræ. An
average net of an epëira, says Mr. Blackwell,
contains eighty-seven thousand three hundred
and sixty of these globules, a large net one
hundred and twenty thousand globules, and yet
Epëira apoclisa, if it meet with no interruption,
will complete its snare in forty minutes. In a
snare of this kind, a spider shod with hair-like
papillæ would have little better chance than a
brush-footed fly.

Dysdera erythrina is a Greek phrase, signifying,
in English, the red struggler, or striver with
difficulties. And the spider thus named is
evidently built for crawling and struggling through
the small cracks and crevices of loose and dry
clay-banks. What the prey of this spider is, I