258 Records of the Indian Museum. { VOL. sas 
previously established species’? were omitted on account of 
‘exigencies of space.’”” Why any volume of a series of books, 
whose chief value lies in their completeness, should have been 
thus curtailed, it is difficult to understand, especially as the volume 
in question is one of the shortest of the series and attempts to 
deal with four comparatively small Orders as well as with the 
immense Order Araneae. It is particularly unfortunate that 
spiders should have been treated in this way, for there is probably 
no other group in the whole of the animal kingdom which is so 
universally distributed in India, and at the same time so striking 
and varied both in structure and in habit. New and interesting 
facts about spiders force themselves upon one’s attention wher- 
ever one goes; but a satisfactory record of them is commonly 
rendered almost impossible by the difficulty of indicating with 
sufficient precision the different kinds of spider to which the vari- 
ous facts refer. 
The extension in 1912 of the space available for the research 
collections of the Indian Museum allowed of a much needed ex- 
pansion of our collection of spiders. Previous to this extension 
the space allotted to spiders was so crowded by bottles of mixtures 
from different localities that no attempt at organization could be 
made. Since then I have devoted such time as I could periodi- 
cally spare to sorting out the contents of these bottles, and getting 
both the named and the far larger unnamed collections systemati- 
cally arranged. 
The present paper, and those with which I hope to follow it, 
are the outcome of this work, which is now approaching its pro- 
visional conclusion. ‘These papers will not aim at an extensive 
revision of the Indian spiders, but will discuss, in the light of the 
specimens in our collection, the classification adopted by Simon 
in his ‘‘ Histoire Naturelle des Araignées’’ (Paris, 1892 and 1897), 
and record the localities from which the specimens dealt with have 
been obtained. 
The extremely scattered literature relating to species of spiders 
already described, often all too briefly and usually without figures, 
together with the means which a large proportion of these species 
possess in early life of travelling long distances through the air, 
render it hopeless for anyone who cannot work on spiders during the 
greater part of his time to determine with certainty whether a species 
he has been unable to name is new to science or not. ‘There are, 
however, many indications that a large proportion of such species 
are actually new. For instance, some common Himalayan spiders 
were described as new by no less an authority than Simon as 
recently as 1go6. It is highly desirable, I think, that as many as 
possible of our more distinctive species should be described and 
named without delay, even at the risk of the creation of a few 
synonyms. ‘The final revision of each family of spiders will have 
to be made by a specialist 1n a position to deal with members of 
that family from all parts of the world, and the richer the pub- 
lished material at his disposal, provided that the descriptions and 
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