I. — New England Spiders of the family Theridid.e. 

 By J. H. Emerton. 



Of the 134 species here clescriberl, 89 species are from Eastern 

 Massachusetts, collected in Boston and the towns west and soutli of 

 it, in Lynn, Salem, Beverly and the adjoining towns. In this neigh- 

 borhood I collected for several j^ears at all seasons, so that this num- 

 ber probably includes nearly all the common and larger species, but 

 of the smaller spiders, Ceratinella, Lophocaremini, Tmetlcas and 

 3IiGroneta, new kinds are found in almost every new locality ex- 

 plored, and it is probable that twice as many species of this family 

 will sooner or later be found here. Farther east I have spiders from 

 Portland and Eastport, Maine, and farther west from Mt. Tom in 

 Ilolyoke, Mass., and Albany, N. Y., nearly all of them the same 

 species as found in Eastern Massachusetts. Farther north I have a 

 few from Montreal, Canada, and 43 s|)ecies from the White Moun- 

 tains, N. H., where I made large collections in the summers of 1874 

 and 1877. Of these, 23 species have not been found elsewhere in 

 New England. They nearly all belong to the smaller genera and 

 live in the damp moss on the slopes of the higher mountains. The 

 spiders found in the valleys of the White Mountains differ but little 

 from those of Massachusetts. I have hardly any spiders from the 

 other parts of New Hampshire, Vermont, or the north of Maine. 

 From the southern part of New England I have a few from Wood's 

 Holl and Martha's Vineyard, Mass., and Newport and Providence, 

 R. I., and 68 species from New Haven, Conn., of which 13 species 

 have not been found elsewhere. I have seen but few spiders of this 

 family from other parts of the country, most collections containing 

 very few species of them, so that I am not sure of the range of a 

 single species. Many New England species were found by Hentz in 

 the Southern States, and other localities are mentioned under the 

 various species, as far as I know them. 



The principal descriptive work on North American spiders is that 

 of Hentz in the Journal of the Boston Society of Natural History, 

 vols, iv, V and vi, reprinted in occasional papers of Boston Soc. of 

 Nat. Hist., No. 2, 1875. In these papers a considerable number of 



Trans. Conn. Acad., Vol. VI. 1 Sept., 1882. 



