SOME ARACHNIDS AT HANOVER, CAPE COLONY. 145 



SOME ARACHNIDS AT HANOVER, CAPE COLONY. 



By S. C. CRONWRIGHT SCHREINER, 



HANOVEB, CAPE COLONY. 



WHEN I left Cape Town for Hanover, my friend, Dr. Purcell, 

 of the South African Museum, the leading South African 

 authority on spiders and their kin, asked me to send him any of 

 these creatures I might capture. The district of Hanover, he said, 

 and indeed, practically, the whole high Karoo plateau, was unexplored 

 arachnologically ; there had been no collection from the high plateau, 

 and he was particularly anxious to have one to compare with the 

 arachnid fauna of the lower-lying Great Karoo. 



I have devoted special attention to spiders, Solifugge and scorpions, 

 though, naturally, other things have found their way into the col- 

 lecting bottles. These have all, from time to time, been sent to 

 Dr. Purcell for classification, and the results have been, on the 

 whole, as surprising as interesting. 



If the reader will take a map of the Cape Colony and follow the 

 railway from Cape Town to Bloemfontein, he will find the little 

 station of Hanover Road lying about midway between De Aar and 

 Naauw Poort Junctions. Nine miles across the veld, southwest from 

 Hanover Road, is the little dorp or village of Hanover, which lies at 

 the foot of two ijzer (iron-stone) kopjes, on a great Karoo flat, 4,700 

 feet above the sea level. A superb fountain gushes out from a 

 covered furrow at the foot of the kopjes, furnishing an abundant 

 supply of water for the houses and the fruit gardens; a great vley 

 runs east and west past the dorp; groups of kopjes dot the mighty 

 veld at intervals, and purple hills and mountains fringe the clean- 

 cut and distant horizon. Hanover is bare and at times very cold 

 in the winter; but, in the summer, when the willow trees along the 

 water furrows that line the streets, and the fruit trees in the gardens 

 about the white houses, are green, the little dorp is, of all small 

 towns I have seen, by far the most beautiful. It lies like a great 

 flower on the brown Karoo not as an excrescence, but as though 

 it were part of the veld. There are old men here who have seen 

 lions in the neighborhood, and younger men who have seen wilde- 

 beeste (gnus) career through the streets. 



My collecting has been confined practically to the commonage in 

 the immediate neighborhood of the dorp, over which, under martial 



VOL. LXII. 10. 



