quite dead, and was smeared with the filthy liquor or saliva, exuded by the monster. I drove away the spider and took the birds, but the second one soon died.” Several spiders have taken to a more or less aquatic life. One of these—the raft-spider—makes, as its name implies, a sort of raft of dry leaves, sticks, etc., which it fastens together by means of its web, and then launches itself on the water, where it is blown about as the wind listeth. When an aquatic insect comes to the surface of the stream, or when a moth or fly falls into it, the spider runs along the water, and seizes it, after which it returns to its raft; or it will run down the stems of the water-plants, and seize what it finds clinging to them, returning with them, or when it requires a fresh supply of air, as before. If threatened with any danger it crawls underneath its raft, and there remains until all is safe again. Still more ingenious are the _façons d’agir_ of the water-spider, which weaves a nest like a diving-bell against some sub-aquatic plant, and fills it with air from above, by carrying down bubbles that cling to the hairs of its body. It used to be thought that this air had exuded from the stems of the plant itself, and so filled the nest affixed to them, but the naturalist Bell, so long ago as 1856, proved that this was not the case, and that the spider brings down its own air, by experiments, of which he gave the following interesting accounts:— “No. 1. Placed in an upright cylindrical vessel of water, in which was a rootless plant of Stratiotes, on the afternoon of November 14th. By the morning it had constructed a very perfect oval cell, filled with air, about the size of an acorn, on this it has remained stationary up to the present time.