"She lives in the dry dust, in the obscure crevices of walls, and especially in those which are called Saettiere (loop-holed walls?), where she constructs a delicate and flexible tube with her viscid secretion, and which she takes care to fasten at its commencement to some solid body at the bottom of the wall, ... the other extremity opening on the inclined plane formed by the dust itself."
We may remark that there is here no mention of any door or concealment at the mouth of the tube, and in this and some other respects the nest of Nemesia cellicola would appear to resemble the nest of Atypus piceus from the neighbourhood of Paris. See above in the text, [p. 78].
B.
On the Habits of Cteniza Ariana.
The following is a free translation of an account read by M. Erber before the Botanico Zoological Association of Vienna,[98] of the very curious observations which he made on Cteniza Ariana when travelling in the Grecian Archipelago.
[98] Verhand. der k. k. zoologisch-botanischer Verein in Wien, vol. xviii. (1868), p. 905.
"On my return voyage [from Rhodes], I stayed for a fortnight in the island of Tinos, and, among other things, I captured several specimens of the so-called trap-door spider (Deckelspinne) Cteniza Ariana, Walck., and with much trouble procured an entire tube and trap-door of this creature.... I am thus enabled to exhibit to this honourable assembly the complete nest of this creature, and the spider herself, with her eggs, preserved in alcohol, and can moreover add some few words as to her habits.
"It needs some practice, as the specimen before you shows, to enable one to discover the nest, as the door is always closed by day. I dug out several of these tubes, but failed to find either the remains of food or excrement. So there was nothing for it but to devote a couple of nights to watch these creatures. With this view I selected a place where many spiders had excavated their tunnels, and availed myself of a moonlight night for my observations.
"Shortly after nine o'clock the doors opened and the spiders came out, fastened back the trap-doors by means of threads to neighbouring blades of grass or little stones, then spun a snare about six inches long by half an inch high, and afterwards returned quietly to their holes.
"I had so chosen my position that I could see three of these spiders at the same time. I now captured a specimen and put it into spirits, and in a short time saw entangled in the net of one of the remaining spiders a Pimelia, and of the other a Cephalostenus, both rather hard-lived, night-flying beetles, which were seized by the spiders, and the latter, after sucking out the juices, carried the empty bodies to a distance of several feet from their holes. All these events happened in about three hours, after which time I allowed the two spiders to remain undisturbed, and returned to the house.