to tell, she chose rather to be buried alive along with her eggs. As the sand concealed from my view what was passing below, I laid hold of the spider, leaving the bag in the power of the ant-lion. But the affectionate mother, deprived of her bag, would not quit the spot where she had lost it, though I repeatedly pushed her with a twig. Life itself seemed to have become a burden to her since all her hopes and pleasures were gone for ever." As this spider may be easily found in the localities we have mentioned, it may interest some of our readers to make trial of the mother's care for her eggs; but, let us hope, only in a gentle spirit. Never let us be guilty of the cruelty above narrated, and leave the disconsolate mother, after her hard struggle for her treasure, without restoring it back to her. Even in an insect, a mother's love, so faithful, self-devoted, and constant, is a sacred thing; and while, as an illustration of the care it has pleased the Creator to implant in it for its offspring, it may be lawful to put it to the trial, it is wrong and cruel to do more. Never let us, for our own amusement, give even to an insect that depth of anguish and despair so beautifully expressed in the words of Jacob, as translated in the margin of our Bibles: "And I, as I am bereaved of my children,--I am bereaved." "In order to prove," says the author of Insect Architecture, "whether a spider of this species could distinguish her own egg-bag from that of a stranger, we interchanged the bags of two individuals which we had put under inverted wine-glasses; but both manifested great uneasiness, and would not touch the strange bags. We then introduced one of the mothers into the glass containing her own eggs and the other spider; but even then she did not take to them, which we attributed to the presence of the other, as all spiders nourish mutual enmity. Upon removing the stranger, however, she showed the same indifference to her eggs as before, and we concluded that, after having lost sight of them for a short time, she was no longer able to recognise them."