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NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS. 501 
of hearing is principally exercised. It is certain that Spiders are 
very sensibly affected by sound, though whether they are capable 
of appreciating and discriminating musical sounds, as has been 
asserted, is more doubtful. 
They have most probably a strong sense of taste, which is 
without doubt seated in the tongue. 
With respect to the sense of pain, there seems no reason to 
believe that Spiders are more susceptible than any others of the 
Articulata, in all of which any sense of acute pain is probably 
almost or altogether wanting. 
Mr. Cambridge has some interesting observations on the 
power to utter sounds possessed by at least one British species, 
Asagena phalerata, the only one, so far as he is aware, in which 
this peculiarity has been noticed, although a stridulating apparatus 
has also been found in a large Indian Spider, Mygale stridulans, 
Wood-Mason. 
From the foregoing remarks it will be seen that ‘ The Spiders 
of Dorset’ is not a mere dry list of species, with technical 
diagnoses, but contains, in addition to necessary descriptions, 
much information that will be interesting, not only to those who 
have made Spiders their special study, but to that larger class of 
naturalists who, for want of a text-book like that now supplied by 
Mr. Cambridge, are perhaps as yet imperfectly informed on the 
subject. 
Some more Scraps about Birds. By Cuartes Murray Apan- 
son. 8vo, pp. 273, with illustrations. Newcastle-on-Tyne : 
Bell & Co. 1881. 
Tuts volume may be regarded as a second series of the 
Notes and Observations on Birds, which, under a somewhat 
similar title, appeared in 1879, and were noticed in ‘ The 
Zoologist’ for that year (p. 391). Many of these notes are 
interesting enough, embracing as they do the results of the 
author’s personal observation of the habits of wildfowl and waders 
on the shores and estuaries of Northumberland during the past 
forty years, and his remarks on the seasonal change of plumage 
which these birds undergo are well worth perusing. But the reader 
is placed at serious disadvantage owing to the form in which these 
notes are presented to him. They appear, for the most part, to 
