Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/165

Rh rim, in which she deposits her eggs, heaped up. She then makes a similar cup which she inverts over them, after which she encloses the eggs between them by soldering them together round the rims. The whole ball of eggs is then spun over with whity-brown silk and attached to the spinners at the end of the abdomen, to be carried about till the young emerge, which crawl out and on to the mother's back, where they remain in a great cluster and are carried about by her for several weeks. She presents an odd spectacle as she rushes about with her numerous progeny on her back.

The Lycosidæ as a family are rovers and do not make regular nests, and this is why the females carry first the egg sacks and then the young about with them. But it is interesting to note that the habit of attaching the egg sack to the spinners (and no doubt also of carrying the young about) persists in the projecting-tube builder and in the trap-door species, although the paramount necessity for doing so apparently no longer exists.

The female Lycosa is said to be often curiously dainty about the color of the silk she uses for the inner cup; it is frequently of some bright color, say orange, while the rims are cemented with silk of some other gay color, say bright green. Sometimes she uses as many as four different colors. But, after all this trouble, she has to cover up her gaudy and attractive cocoon with some dull-covered silk, so as not to attract the notice of flies and wasps on the lookout for a nest of fat eggs in which to deposit an egg or two of their own.

My finds in Eresidæ cover five species. Several of them, belonging to Eresus and Dresserus, found under stones in dense tangles of web, are very slow in their movement and feign death when exposed; one of them is a large creature with an abdomen nearly an inch long and half an inch broad, resembling a huge cattle tick in shape and color (a brownish or bluish slate), even to the puncture-like marks on the back. Of the other species, one is Stegodyphus; you may see their dense ball-like yellow nests on the karoo bushes, with powerful strands binding them in all directions. At least one species of Stegodyphus is social, but the local form lives solitary or in pairs.

Another is perhaps the most interesting Hanover find. A neighboring Dutch farmer (who carefully obtains the Latin name of every species he brings, and who has been a most useful contributor) asked me if I knew of a small 'licht bruin' (light brown) spider that made a double door. Neither I nor any one else, so far as I know, had ever heard of such a thing. But my friend was not far wrong. Where there are ijzer-kopjes (kopjes of dolerite boulders) there are generally, somewhere on the gentle slopes of the flat at the foot, patches of gritty red sand, composed largely of the disintegrated dolerite. The