Art. Y. — A Contribution to our Knowledge of the Spiders 

 of Victoria; including some New Sjpecies and 

 Genera. 



By H. R. HOGG, M.A. 



(Plates XIII. to XVII.) 

 [Eead 19th April, 1900]. 



The spiders from my own collection here dealt with have been 

 taken almost wholly about the neighbourhood of Macedon, and 

 may therefore be considered as fairly representative of the central 

 portion of the Dividing Range of the colony of Victoria. 



The Australian spiders described by L. Koch and E. von 

 Keyserling, our chief workers in the past, were mostly collected 

 by the agents of Messrs. Godeffroy Brothers of Hamburg, from 

 about their trading stations for produce in Queensland, New 

 South Wales, and the Pacific islands ; they also include the work 

 done by Mr. Bradley in New South Wales, Mr. Urquhart in 

 New Zealand, and by Messrs. Thorell and 0. P. Cambridge, from 

 desultory specimens, so that the southern portion of the conti- 

 nent has remained more or less unworked. 



The Godeffroy collection, unhappily, was broken up some years 

 ago, and no reliance can now be placed on the specimens' at times 

 sold by dealers as L. Koch's types, but the National Museum of 

 Victoria has a good representative set of named specimens, pur- 

 chased many years ago therefrom, reputed to be types. Von 

 Keyserling's collection is in the British Museum, and his types 

 are available for comparison, but the Australian ones are com- 

 paratively few in number, so that in determining species written 

 descriptions have to be followed in the large majority of instances, 

 leaving an unsatisfactory margin of liability to error even where, 

 as in this case, they are so minutely and conscientiously detailed. 



The illustrations are fortunately very voluminous, and where 

 I have been able to compare them with the originals, I have been 

 imbued with great respect for the accuracy of the work. 



