know not. Ants abound in the loose earth in
which it crawls, and I have found in it the
remains of little univalve shells and of chitons.
Those red strugglers which I have kept, have
enjoyed a few drops of water, and have washed
and refreshed themselves in it, but I have never
yet seen one of them attack a victim and feed
upon it. I once, indeed, saw a female kill a
male by plunging her fangs into his abdomen
when he was merely asking her to be friends with
him. He hid himself immediately in the clay
and died, and she forthwith, as if to hide her
shame, enveloped herself in a silken bag, which
only was not her winding-sheet, because she came
out of it to die.

Attached by threads to the distal end of the
silken tube of the red struggler, I found little
silken bags, which I mistook at first for egg-
bags, with their mouths stopped up by the
carapace or corslet of a spider of the same species.
I had often seen the bodies of beetles in the
nests or cocoons of their young, and I jumped to
the conclusion that these were the remains of
defunct spiders in the egg-bags in which their eggs
were waiting to be hatched. But the egg-bag
proved to be a skin-bag. As far as the knowledge
and reading of myself, friends, and correspondents
go, these skin-bags have hitherto escaped the
notice of the students of spiders. Exploring
the clay-bank subsequently, in which I found
Dysdera erythriua, I found at least a dozen of
these bags, and on opening them discovered
nothing in them, except cast-off skins. A dark
and nearly black spider, found in the neighbourhood
of the tubes of the red struggler, crawling
in the cracks and crevices of clay-banks (probably
the spider which Walckenäer calls Clubiona, and
Blackwell Ciniflo atrox), appears also to have
this instinct. Moreover, certain labyrinth spiders
(Angelena labyrinthica) which I have kept for
several months in a box, have, I observe, wound
sheets of silk around the corpses of little heaps
of their victims. But the most curious observation
respecting these skin-bags remains to be told.
Most of these bags contain only a single skin;
but I have found a species of spider, the young
of which are social, and several of these, at
any rate whilst young, deposit their skins
together in one white oval bag. The explanation,
as nearly as I can guess it, of this singular habit
of spinning silken bags around their cast-off
skins, is to retard the decay, and diminish the
nuisance of dead animal matter. Bees have, I
am told, a similar instinct, surrounding with
wax anything offensive which is put into their
hives.

The labyrinth spiders are usually found solitary
or in pairs, with a wide sheet of silk spread out
on grass, ending in a funnel descending into some
hole, on the side of a bank. I have, indeed, seen
one in the fork of the branches of a hawthorn-
bush. Last July I put three of these spiders
into a box, about a foot long, and some six or
seven inches deep, but of such thin material that,
by means of a glass window in the top, I could,
when holding the box up to the light, see
everything which went on inside. I caught insects
for them, and put them through a little hole,
which I stopped with a cork, in the top. It was
very singular to watch their different modes of
killing their prey. Bluebottles and gadflies they
despatched by springing upon them, and plunging
their fangs into the backs of their chests.
Large moths, whose wings vibrate with great
force and quickness when they are attacked, they
seized as they did the bluebottles and gadflies,
only whilst holding on by their fangs and forelegs,
they most carefully held their other six legs
up and aloof, beyond the chance of a shock from
the rapidly moving wings. Grasshoppers, taking
strong leaps from one end to the other, or from
the bottom to the top of the box, gave them more
trouble; but they know how to bide their time.
When a grasshopper had exhausted himself, and
was resting for a moment, a spider would
approach him cautiously, and seize hold of one of
his legs. Then for an instant there was a fearful
struggle; but the leg of the grasshopper being
held by two fangs and eight legs, was soon torn
out of its socket at the hip. Beetles require more
skill even than grasshoppers. A strong large
beetle found no difficulty with his mandibles in
tearing through the web, and coursing round the
bottom of the box. At last, as the spider seemed
to expect, the beetle ran up and down on what
might be called his beat. On perceiving this the
spider would descend quietly to the bottom of
the box, and gently lay down threads on the path
of the beetle. By-and-by one of the legs on one
side of the beetle becoming entangled in the
web, whilst he is struggling to free himself, the
spider would approach him swiftly on the other
side, and tilt him over on his back, and then
holding off his legs, plunge its fangs into his
abdomen two or three times.

These spiders not merely make solitary tubes,
they can make labyrinths co-operatively. The
three spiders of this species which I confined in
the box I have described, lived separately and
apart, each of the females spinning for herself a
silken bower at opposite ends of the box, and
the male making his abode on a web under the
window and half way up the side of the box.
They all knew in time very well the hole in the
top through which their food came, and each of
them wished to be equally near the hole without
being exposed to each other; and this they
managed by constructing a most singular
labyrinth near the hole. It consisted of a fabric of
silk reaching from near the top to near the
bottom, and consisting of many partitions with
passages out and in all round, a silken puzzle
or labyrinth of successive tiers of exits and
entrances constructed equally for surprises and
escapes. Now, this strange structure was built
co-operatively, for each of the spiders wove the
part most convenient for itself, and the whole
was adapted to an end which was likely to be
for their common and mutual, as well as for their
separate and individual, advantage.