" wind-scorpions:' 323 



rise to much speculation. Their purely secondary origin is 

 shown in the fact that the folds which mark them off have 

 come between the large median eyes and the lateral eyes, 

 quite displacing the latter. 



With regard to the eyes, it was long thought that the 

 Galeodidai differed from all the other large Arachnids in 

 having no lateral eyes. But as long ago as 1826 lateral 

 eyes were attributed to Galeodes by so great an observer 

 as Johannes Miiller.^ He claimed six eyes, whereas no one 

 else could find more than two. This claim seems gener- 

 ally to have been dismissed by students with aston- 

 ishment. One pair of the extra four eyes, for instance, 

 could be explained as the tubercular bases of the pair of 

 bristles often found in front of the large eyes ; these, with 

 the bristles knocked off, might be mistaken for eyes. The 

 other pair could not be found at all until quite recently, 

 when, in working over sections, the present writer found 

 two pairs of very degenerate lateral eyes in a species of 

 Rhax, and afterwards discovered similar structures in other 

 specimens. They were not found, however, till long after 

 Johannes M tiller's apparently utterly erroneous assertion 

 that Galeodes had six eyes had been dismissed and com- 

 pletely forgotten. Having again looked up the original, 

 the present writer has no doubt that the lateral eyes 

 which he thought he was the first to discover had al- 

 ready been noticed and their true nature guessed seventy 

 years ago. They so little resemble eyes, and the position 

 into which they have been, forced by the formation of the 

 hinges for the jaws is so unlikely a place for eyes, that 

 there is little wonder that, until the retinae were actually 

 seen in sections, they were never again recognised. 



Upon the last pair of legs occur the " raquet organs" 

 which have also greatly puzzled naturalists. These are 

 fan-shaped structures supported on short stalks, five on 

 each leg. They are purely sensory, and appear to be 

 erectile. The nerve-endings open round their distal edges. 

 The earlier writers justly compared them with the combs 



1 Vergleichende Physiologic des Lichtsinnes. 



