enemies and more competitors are found, are reserved for the architects of the more complicated nests.
Doubtless naturalists will soon discover wafer nests on the slopes of the Pyrenees, as for example at Pau and other winter stations in South-western France; and perhaps the coast of the Bay of Biscay may also yield specimens, even to the north of Bordeaux. If so, this curious speculation as to whether there is any relation between simplicity of structure and warmth of climate, will be put on its trial.
About the very time when I was engaged in digging out these new wafer nests at Montpellier, the celebrated arachnologist, Dr. L. Koch of Nuremberg, had just published[1] an account and figure of a very remarkable nest which he had received from Australia, and which, though differing both in form and proportions from the Montpellier nest, may nevertheless perhaps be referred to the present single-door branched wafer type.
This Australian nest, the exact habitat of which is not mentioned, is constructed by a spider now described for the first time under the name of Idioctis helva. The nest has a wafer-door about the size of a sixpence, closing a vertical tube less than half an inch long, which meets and opens into a horizontal tube about three inches in length, and forms with it what may be roughly likened to the figure of a capital T inverted, thus, .
The upstroke of the T is however, very short, and one of the arms is longer than the other, and curved downwards at its extremity. This is, as far as I know, the first recorded example of a wafer-nest from the
- ↑ Dr. L. Koch, Arachniden Australiens, 10te. Lieferuug, Nurnberg, 1874, tab. xxxvii. fig. 3, p. 484.
