I liiilltlin Anurican Museum of Natural History. [Vol. XXIX, 



\vt)rlil ;irc of j,Mvat valiu', as well as thoso of ("haniherlin on the Lycosidae 

 of North America ami of tlic I'eekhams on the Attids. McCook's great 

 work on tin- ()rl>\veaving spiders of the United States will for a long time 

 still remain a standard, hut from the point of view of systematics this 

 group undoul)te(lly requires a thorougli reinvestigation. But no attempt 

 has heen made as yet to give if not a complete treatise, at least a complete 

 list of all the species of the western continent, although such a list would 

 greatly facilitate further research. The present catalogue, the first attempt 

 of its kind, is intended to meet this want. 



For the convenience of the student I have divided the catalogue into 

 three parts: (1) The Bibliography, (2) The List of species with synonyms 

 and references, (3) An alphabetic index to synonyms. 



F1K8T Part, Bibliography. — To make a complete list of papers dealing 

 with American spiders is by no means easy. The majority of the titles 

 were readily gathered from the bibliographic works of Agassiz, Taschen- 

 berg, the Zoologischer Anzeiger (Bibliographia zoologica) and the Zoological 

 Record. Hut I soon found that this method alone would leave the list 

 very incomplete, and that besides, the references given in the works men- 

 tioned, especially in the last, abound in errors which, however slight, are 

 often of such a kind as to make it at times very difficult to find the papers 

 referred to. In consequence I have found myself forced to examine care- 

 fully all zoological magazines and works from the time of Linnaeus up to 

 the present year. To accomplish this it was necessary to visit all the 

 libraries in Xew York, Boston, Cambridge, Philadelphia and Washington 

 and the present list is in all probability as near perfection as may be expected 

 from one obliged to do his work without assistance. As I have already 

 stated, a great many papers contain descriptions of species from different 

 countries, others have no title whatever. Therefore it was necessary to 

 carefully peruse every paper dealing with spiders, and whenever a descrip- 

 tion of an American spider was encountered, such an article was incorporated 

 into the list. 



Second Part. — The arrangement of the second part requires some 

 explanation. The division into families is in accordance with the system of 

 Simon, laid down in his Histoire Xaturelle des Araisnees. The onlv 

 deviation I allowed myself is the recognition of his two subfamilies, Liny- 

 phiinre and Erigonina-, as one family, Linyphiidfe, leaving to the family 

 Argiopidse his subfamilies Tetragnathina^, Nephilinte and Argiopina^. 

 At first I intended to arrange the genera in the same sequence as that 

 given by Simon. Two objections however stood in the way of such an 

 arrangement. The first and chief objection is that although the genera 

 accepted in this catalogue conform to the definitions given to them by 



