Page:Supplement to harvesting ants and trap-door spiders (IA supplementtoharv00mogg).pdf/44

 of the ground, the moss, scales, and fibres of plants which are woven into, and serve to conceal the aërial portion, and its termination in a twisted and apparently-closed mouth.

Indeed, I believe that, in this specimen, the upper extremity of the tube is really closed, for, when I succeeded in inflating this aërial portion, the lips did not part, but remained drawn together.

It seems very extraordinary that the mouth of the tube should be thus closed, so that the female spider becomes a prisoner, self-immured, and I can only suppose that this is a temporary condition, limited perhaps to the period during which she receives the visits of the male.

At the very base of the tube I found a mass of earth, roots and vegetable fibres, and in this I hoped to have detected the débris of insects or other food, such as I sometimes find at the bottom of and below the tubes of the trap-door nests in the South, but of this there was no trace.

It is difficult to me to imagine how the spider could contrive to live by the capture of worms, after the fashion suggested by M. Simon; for who does not know the speed with which, on the slightest alarm, worms draw back into their holes and escape pursuit, and the muscular power which they exert in resisting any attempts to drag them out of the earth?

M. Simon's account of the closed tube and capture of worms by this spider corresponds, however, with that given by Mr. Joshua Brown, the first discoverer of Atypus in England.

This gentleman communicated his discovery to Mr.