168 BRITISH SPECIES OF PHALANGIDEA OH HARVEST MEN. 



cens, is certainly no more than a small, and perhaps local, form of 

 Phalangium cornutum ; and another, Plialangium minutum Mcade, 

 appears to be a very doubtful species, leaving fourteen only certainly 

 known to be British at that time, To these I am able now to add 

 nine others, and I do not doubt but that if these groups were fairly 

 worked, especially along our South-Eastern, Southern, and South- 

 Western Coasts, the twenty-four species here described would be 

 materially added to. In recommending our entomologists to turn 

 a wider attention to the Phalangidea, I may observe that besides 

 being a group of animals of very remarkable details of structure, 

 they have nothing whatever disgusting or objectionable about them, 

 but are particularly interesting and cleanly in their ways and quite 

 inoffensive, possessed of no venom, and doing no injury to man or 

 any of his possessions ; rather, on the contrary, by preying upon the 

 insect world, doing him good. Of the twenty-four British Phalangids 

 twenty-one have been found by myself in Dorsetshire, two of the 

 remaining three being Alpine forms, and one a doubtful species. 



DESCRIPTIONS OP GENERA AND SPECIES. 



CLASS ARACHNIDA. 



ORDER PHALANGIDEA (Cambr.) OPILIONES (Sundeval, Simon). 



Plate A. 



Ceplicdotlwrax (consisting of the caput and thorax) forms a 

 single portion on which there are usually grooves, sutures, or 

 impressed lines more or less distinctly marking the segments 

 composing it. In some pristine form no doubt these segments, 

 like those similarly soldered together in the corresponding portion 

 of the true spiders, were separated and free, but in the existing 

 forms the progress of development has crowded them up together, 

 not only to the extent of coalescence, but almost to the obliteration 

 of any trace of their once separate existence. 



A Women segmented ; fitting up and united to the cephalothorax 

 throughout its width, having been evidently acted upon by the 

 same causes as those which crushed up the segment of the thorax 

 into the caput. The segments of the abdomen are not the same 



