188 M. T. Thorell on Aranea lobata. 
A. lobata, and its identity with A. sericea which is dependent 
upon that fact, it will be sufficient and conclusive to consult 
the German edition of the Spicil. Zool. fasc. 9, translated and 
revised by Pallas himself, and printed in 1777 under the 
title ‘ Naturgeschichte merkwiirdiger Thiere,’ 9te Sammlung, 
pp: 71, 72. From the account therein given of A. lobata we 
extract the following :— 
¢... the true country of the spider the description of 
which I have already furnished from preserved specimens. 
.... L have met with it in the warm southern parts about the 
Wolga, and on the Upper Irtisch, and have indeed found it 
already perfectly developed in the month of May. .... It has 
also been noticed by my lamented friend Prof. Falk in the 
corners of houses in Zariczan ; and Prof. Lepechin, who has 
described and figured it in the first part of his Russian Voyage 
(p. 395, pl. 16. fig. 2), found it under the hollow bark of a tree, 
brooding over its eggs” (loc. cit. p. 72). 
Thus we find,—first, that Pallas expressly gives the south 
of Russia (both in Europe and Asia) as the country of A. lo- 
bata; and, secondly, that, according to Pallas, Lepechin’s 
above-named Aranea (“abdomine .... lobato,”’ &e.) is the 
same species as the A. lobata, Pallas. 
Both Pallas and Nordmann in the above-cited passage give 
us every reason to suppose that this species is as far from 
being one of the rarer forms of spider in the south of Russia 
as it is indeed in Italy and the south of France. 
Attention having been once called to the matter, no one 
would henceforth think of believing Pallas’s A. lobata to be 
the same as Petiver’s “ Araneotdes capensis” from the Cape 
of Good Hope; also Olivier’s specific name sericea must give 
place to the much older one of Jobata, and the species be 
henceforth known as Argiope lobata (Pallas). 
Fabricius adopts A. lobata in the ‘Species Insectorum’ 
(1781), after Pallas (Spicil. Zool.) ; and while he cites this 
author, he includes also, but with a query, Petiver’s species 
from the Cape among the synonyms, doubtless on the ground 
of Pallas’s previously hazarded guess concerning the habitat 
of A. lobata. He does the same in the ‘ Mantissa Insectorum’ 
(1787). For the habitat of the species, Fabricius, im both 
these works, has candidly left a blank. But some years later 
(1793), in the ‘Entomologia Systematica’ (tom. 1. p. 407), 
while giving the same diagnosis and synonymy for A. lobata 
as in the ‘Species Insectorum,’ he says, ‘‘ Habitat ad Caput 
Bonz Spei,” showing that he now abandoned his former un- 
certainty as to the country of this species, and, of his own 
accord, regarded it as exclusively exotic—an assumption 
