one door, while C and D have two, these latter having a surface door, and also another door a short way under ground.
All the nests consist of a tube excavated in the earth to a greater or less depth, unbranched in all but D, and in every case lined with silk, this lining being continuous with the lining of the door or doors of which it forms the hinge.
I have found it convenient to distinguish these four types of nests by the following names:—A, the single door cork nest, or shortly the cork nest; B, the single door wafer nest; C, the double door unbranched nest; and D, the double door branched nest.
The type B has only been found in the West India Islands, and is chiefly distinguished from A by having a thin and wafer-like door, wholly constructed of silk, without admixture of earth, lying on rather than fitting into the aperture of the tube; while in A the door is much thicker, made of layers of earth and silk, and so contrived that it tightly closes the mouth of the tube, which is bevelled to receive it, much as a cork closes the neck of a bottle.[1]
The West Indian nests are of a much tougher and coarser texture than those which I have seen in Europe, and vary somewhat in the shape of their tube, which is curved or straight, and sometimes has near its lower extremity a short spur-shaped enlargement, giving to the whole a ludicrous resemblance to a stocking, of which this spur is the heel.
Mr. Gosse,[2] in his Naturalist's Sojourn in Jamaica,
- ↑ Nests belonging to the type A, are represented in Plates VII., p. 88, and VIII., p. 94.
- ↑ Gosse (P. H.), Naturalist's Sojourn in Jamaica (1851), p. 115-118. See also for another description of the same nest Latreille's Vues Générales sur les Araneides, in the Nouv. Ann. du Muséum (Paris, 1832), tom. i. p. 73-4.
