3956 The Zoologist— April, 1874. 



LiNNEAN Society of London. 

 Feb. 5, 1874. — George Bentham, Esq., F.R.S., President, in the chair. 

 [No scientific business.] 



February 19, 1874. — J. Gwyn Jeffreys, Esq., F.R.S., in the chair. 

 The following papers were read, viz. : — 



1. "Systematic List of the Spiders at present known to inhabit Great 

 Britain and Ireland." By the Rev. O. P. Cambridge. (Presented by 

 Mr. H. T. Stainton.) During the last five years a constant communication 

 and interchange of typical examples of spiders has been going on between 

 Dr. T. Thorell, of Upsala, Dr. Koch, of Nvirnberg, M. Eugene Simon, of 

 Paris, the writer, and others, with a view to a determination of the synonymic 

 identity of the species recorded as indigenous to Europe, but principally to 

 Sweden, France, Germany and England. The results of this investigation 

 have been published by Dr. Thorell in a most laborious and exhaustive work 

 lately completed, ' On the Synonyms of European Spiders.' The effect of 

 this work is to give priority to names of many British spiders described by 

 Mr. Blackwall and the writer other than the names they bear in the works 

 of those authors. The time therefore appears to have arrived when a list, 

 complete to the present time, of the known spiders of Great Britain and 

 Ireland under the names to which, according to the laws of priority, they 

 appear to be entitled, seems to be a desideratum. Dr. Thorell, indeed (Syn. 

 Eur. Spid. p. 471), gives a list of British spiders ; but it is complete only to 

 the date of Mr. BlackwaU's work, ' Spiders of Great Britain and Ireland,' 

 since the publication of which the number of known indigenous species lias 

 increased by nearly one-half. The systematic arrangement of Mr. Blackwall 

 has not been adopted in this list, appearing, as it did, to be too artificial and 

 based on insufiicient (though in some respects convenient) characters, and, 

 moreover, never to have found favour with other araueologists. The present 

 arrangement (though it has no pretensions to finality) is the result of a long 

 and tolerably careful study of spiders from many and widely different regions 

 of the world. It begins at the opposite end to that where Dr. ThoreU and 

 Dr. Koch begin their systematic arrangements ; but it is, in the main, not 

 very discordant with that of the former of these authors, as put forth in his 

 valuable work ' On the Genera of European Spiders,' a work to which the 

 writer is indebted for many most valuable hints on the classification of the 

 Araneidea. 



2. " Some Observations on the Vegetable Productions and Rural Economy 

 of the Province of Baghdad." By W. H. Colvill, Surgeon-Major H.M. Indian 

 Forces, Civil Service, Baghdad. (Communicated by Dr. Hooker.) 



