DESCRIPTION OF GENERA AND SPECIES. 133 



adopted by Thorell, in his splendid paper on European Spiders, contin- 

 ued in his " Synonyms," and has been retained by him ever since adopted. 

 Count Keyserling used it in his latest works, as does the French araneol- 

 ogist, Eugene Simon (1892), in the first volume of his revised Natural 

 History of Spiders, which promises to be a monumental work. In Amer- 

 ica Dr. George Marx, the editor of Keyserling's Epeiridse, and Professor 

 and Mrs. Peckham agree with myself in the use of the word. On the 

 contrary, Mr. Cambridge, in his beautiful work on the spiders, in Biologia 

 Centrali-Americana, retains the earlier term, Araneidea. This concensus of 

 araneologists seems to be justified. Aranea was the original generic name 

 of all spiders, but there is now no genus of true spiders thus called, and 

 therefore there can be no objection on that account to call the order 

 Araneae, a word which seems to be eminently proper, since it signifies 

 sjiiders, just as, for example, Aves signifies birds, and Serpentes signifies 

 snakes. 



As to the use of the terms Araneides and Araneidea, Thorell urges two 

 objections : first, that it is altogether illogical, since the addition of the 

 terminal syllable indicates an enlargement of the conception that 

 . , lies in the word to which such termination is appended. For 



instance, by Carabidse we mean all Carabi, and besides a num- 

 ber of animals more or less closely allied to them. By Araneidea, there- 

 fore, properly speaking, we would mean spiders and animals closely related 

 to them. Moreover, the form is regarded by Thorell as liable to the 

 objection that it is a hybrid, being a compound of a Greek and a Latin 

 M'ord, and should on that account, if for no other reason, be rejected,^ an 

 opinion in which the purists, at least, will concur. 



Before passing to the description of species it will be well to state the 

 author's reasons for certain changes therein made in the Hentzian nomen- 

 clature of certain well known species. In the year 1887, while 

 Changes visiting the Zoological Library of the Kensington (London) 

 , , Museum of Natural History, my attention was called to a series 



of manuscript drawings of American spiders. These proved to 

 be the original notes and figures of John Abbot, beautifully drawn and 

 colored from nature, upon which Baron Walckenaer had based the descrip- 

 tions in his Natural History of Apterous Insects. This find seemed to me 

 most important. It was my first knowledge that the drawings were extant, 

 and I know of no printed statement of what had become of them after 

 Walckenaer's death. No English or American araneologist had made any 

 use of them, and if known at all their value was not appreciated. How 

 they came into the possession of the Kensington Museum I could not learn, 

 but no doubt they were bought by the authorities soon after Walckenaer's 

 death. 



' Syn. Europ. Spid., page 507. 



