and the door (fig. 10, c, the arrow). In many cases she is found dead behind this screen, while her door, after warping with the weather, allows the entrance of all sorts of vermin—woodlice, centipedes, aptera, small spiders, and a large number of other forms of insect-life. These cannot reach her, for the screen shuts them off.

Unless there is an absence of moisture, hunger has no terrors for these spiders, for they are easily able to exist without food for three or four months. Frequently in a famine a spider devours her neighbour, a hard fight always ensuing first.

I have several reasons to suspect that Pompilius fugax, &c., is a keen enemy of M. distinctus. I have caught P. fugax dragging a trapdoor spider across a bank. Whether the spider was caught by the fly by the latter opening the door, or by the spider jumping out to catch the fly and instead catching a Tartar, I know not, but I have more than once found a pupa-case of a small Ichneumon fly lying among the remains of a spider.