SVs NOTES, ON INDIANZ MYGALOMORPH 
oS Par Die S) 
By F. H. GRavety, M.Sc., Asst. Superintendent, Indian Museum. 
(Plate XV). : 
The present is intended to be the first of a series of papers on 
Indian spiders, based on the collections in the Indian Museum. 
The earliest descriptions of species in this collection were 
published by Stoliczka, in the Journal of the Asiatic Society for 
1869. He pointed out in a most forcible manner the extraordi- 
nary neglect with which the study of so important and fascinating 
a group as the Indian Arachnida had met, a neglect which he set 
himself to remedy. The variety of other groups with which he 
was occupied can have left him little time for such work, and he 
only published two papers! in connection with it. But he collect- 
ed specimens vigorously right up to the time of his early death 
in 1874. The whole of his private collection was bequeathed to 
the Indian Museum, where most of it still remains in good condi- 
. tion. 
Since Stoliczka’s death several Orders of Indian Arachnids 
have been investigated by Kraepelin, Pocock, Thorell, Roewer, 
Nuttall, Warburton and others; but our knowledge of Indian 
spiders is still woefully incomplete. 
In the years 1887-9 the spiders preserved in the Indian 
Museum formed the subject of a series of short papers contributed 
by Simon to the Journal of the Asiatic Soctety of Bengal. And a 
short paper on our Mygalomorphae was published by Hirst in the 
Records of the Indian Museum for 1909. 
In 1895 the British Museum published an account of the 
spiders of Burma by Thorell, who in 1896 and 1898 respectively 
contributed two lengthy papers on the spiders collected in Burma 
by Fea, to the Annals of the Civic Natural History Museum of 
Genoa. 
: In 1899 the Bombay Natural History Society published a 
paper by Pocock on Indian spiders with which they had supplied 
him. This was followed in 1900 by a paper in the same Journal 
containing descriptions which ‘‘ were drawn up for publication in a 
volume upon the Arachnida of India, forming part of the Fauna 
of India Series’’ but which ‘‘ together with the diagnoses of many 
! * A Contribution towards the Knowledge of Indian Arachnoidea” (¥.A.S.B. 
xxxvili [IT], PP: 201-251, pls. xvili-xx) ; and ‘Notes on the Indian species of 
Thelyphonus”’ (F.A.S.B. xiii [11], pp. 126-141, pl. xli). 
