158 NATURAL SCIENCE. March, 



An Ancient Arachnid. 



A WELCOME contribution to our knowledge of fossil Arachnida is 

 a short " Note on Eophrynus," by Messrs. F. T. Howard and T. H. 

 Thomas, published last year in the Transactions of the Cardiff 

 Naturalists' Society (vol. xxviii.)- The specimen forming the subject 

 of the paper, and identified as Eophrynus carbonis, Woodw., was 

 discovered in a coal-pit at Pentre in the Rhondda Valley. Unfor- 

 tunately it consists merely of the lower side of the abdomen, no traces 

 of the cephalothorax or appendages, about which there is still much to 

 be learnt, being visible. Many interesting points of structure have, 

 however, been preserved, and these have been clearly reproduced in 

 the enlarged figures on the plate accompanying the paper. 



For the following comment we are indebted to Mr. R. I. Pocock. 

 " The authors with enviable confidence describe as stigmata five pairs 

 of slits piercing the front margin of segments 2-6. If their inter- 

 pretation be correct, the fact is one of far higher morphological 

 importance than they seem to suspect. For no arachnid, recent or 

 fossil, is known to possess more than four pairs of abdominal 

 stigmata ; and the recent species of Opiliones, the order to which 

 Eophrynus and its allies, Kveischeria and Anthracomartus, appear to 

 belong, are characterised by the presence of but a single pair placed 

 upon the first free sternal plate of the abdomen. These considerations, 

 coupled with the fact that Eophrynus, in spite of its great antiquity, is 

 a specialized and not a primitive type, would make one inclined to 

 suspend judgment as to the respiratory nature of the orifices in 

 question. 



" As for the name that Messrs. Howard and Thomas have 

 assigned to Mr. O'Connor's specimen, I venture to think, though 

 after all this is a small matter, that it is probably erroneous with regard 

 both to genus and species. In the first place the structural 

 differences between the abdomen of this' fossil and that of Eophrynus 

 prestwichii are too great, one would think, to permit the species in 

 which they occur being rightly referred to the same genus ; and 

 in the second place Dr. Woodward's figure of the abdomen of 

 Eophrynus carbonis represents this region as considerably longer than 

 wide, whereas in the example from Pentre the abdomen, unless greatly 

 expanded by crushing, must have been a good deal wider than long." 



Caution in creating new genera and species is no doubt highly 

 commendable, and no one will accuse palaeontologists as a class with 

 reluctance in projecting new names into literature. But in cases like 

 the present where the characters of the fossil are clearly expressed, a 

 wrong determination is apt to lead one's fellow-students into error. 



Prehistoric Man. 



Mr. John Ward has collected together in the Reliquary and 

 Illustrated Archcsologist a compendious account of the exploration 



