xamine our find and look more closely into its shapelessness.
Here is the large room, the maternal cabin, which rips as the coating of
leaves is removed; here are the circular galleries of the guard-room;
here are the central chamber and its pillars, all in a fabric of
immaculate white. The dirt from the damp ground has not penetrated to
this dwelling protected by its wrapper of dead leaves.

Now open the habitation of the offspring. What is this? To my utter
astonishment, the contents of the chamber are a kernel of earthy matters,
as though the muddy rain-water had been allowed to soak through. Put
aside that idea, says the satin wall, which itself is perfectly clean
inside. It is most certainly the mother's doing, a deliberate piece of
work, executed with minute care. The grains of sand are stuck together
with a cement of silk; and the whole resists the pressure of the fingers.

If we continue to unshell the kernel, we find, below this mineral layer,
a last silken tunic that forms a globe around the brood. No sooner do we
tear this final covering than the frightened little ones run away and
scatter with an agility that is singular at this cold and torpid season.

To sum up, when working in the natural state, the Labyrinth Spider builds
around the eggs, between two sheets of satin, a wall composed of a great
deal of sand and a little silk. To stop the Ichneumon's probe and the
teeth of the other ravagers, the best thing that occurred to her was this
hoarding which combines the hardness of flint with the softness of
muslin.

This means of defence seems to be pretty frequent among Spiders. Our own
big House Spider, _Tegenaria domestica_, encloses her eggs in a globule
strengthened with a rind of silk and of crumbly wreckage from the mortar
of the walls. Other species, living in the open under stones, work in
the same way. They wrap their eggs in a mineral shell held together with
silk. The same fears have inspired the same protective methods.

Then how comes it that, of the five mothers reared in my cages, not one
has had recourse to the clay rampart? After all, sand abounded: the pans
in which the wire-gauze covers stood were full of it. On the other hand,
under normal conditions, I have often come across nests without any
mineral casing. These incomplete nests were placed at some height from
the ground, in the thick of the brushwood; the others, on the contrary,
those supplied with a coating of sand,