yellow, mottled with black and white. This
proposition is so well established as to need but few illustrations.
The Therididae furnish many examples, as T. murarium, a gray spider
varied with black and white, said by Emerton to live usually "under
stones and fences, where it is well concealed by its color"; and
Lophocarenum rostratum, a yellowish-brown spider, found among leaves
on the ground. Among the Attidae bright sexual coloring often gains the
ascendancy over the protective tints, yet this family gives us good
examples in such species as M. familiaris and S. pulex.

To these may be added an as yet undescribed species which we
discovered last season in a neighborhood that we had searched
thoroughly for eight summers. We found the new spider in great
numbers, but could only detect it by a close scrutiny of the rail
fences on which it lived, its color being dark gray....

[Illustration: FIG. 5. ORNITHOSCATOIDES DECIPIENS (from Cambridge).]

The last instance that I shall cite is a predaceous spider which is
disguised from both its enemies and its prey by an elaborate
combination of form, color, position, and character of web. I refer to
Ornithoscatoides decipiens (Fig. 5), first described by Forbes and
afterwards by Cambridge, the latter author giving in the same paper
descriptions of three other species of the same genus, whose habits
have not been noted, but whose protection is evidently of the same
order as that of decipiens. I give Forbes's interesting account of his
capture of decipiens, quoting also the remarks by which Cambridge
prefaces his description, since his explanation of the gradual
development, through Natural Selection, of the spider's deceptive
appearance applies as well to all the cases of protective disguise
which have been here enumerated.

The capture is described as follows:--

"On June 25th, 1881, in the forest near the village of Lampar, on the
banks of the Moesi river in Sumatra, while my 'boys' were procuring
for me some botanical specimens from a high tree, I was rather
dreamily looking on the shrubs before me, when I became conscious of
my eyes resting on a bird-excreta-marked leaf. How strange, I thought,
it is that I have never got another specimen of that curious spider I
found in Java which simulated a patch just like this! I plucked the
leaf by the petiole while so cogitating, and looked at it half
listlessly for some moments, mentally remarking how closely that other
spider ha