LUTZ, LIST OF GREATER ANTILLEAN SPIDERS 



125 



wonderful success but the}' clo not seem to be good material for a West 

 Indian discussion because there are so few of them. It is decidedly in- 

 teresting that, except for bats, the Antillean mammals are rodents be- 

 longing to South American groups and Solenodon. a genus of Insectivora, 

 whose nearest relatives are found only in Madagascar. These relation- 

 ships will be referred to later but it may be noted in passing that such 

 distributions are fairly common among spiders. The figures given by 

 Wallace for birds show that about one-third of the Antillean genera are 

 peculiar. This proportion is far greater than that for spiders aurl. wlien 



Fig. 3. — Sandy plain south of Pinar del Rio, Ciiha 



compared with the bird fauna of Central America, for example, sliows a 

 high degree of specialit}^, but Wallace's list gives only 95 geiiera of birds 

 for the West Indies and there are more than 500 geuera in Central 

 America. The small number of vertebrates in the West hidies and tlie 

 fact that a large proportion of those which are thei'e are ])eculiar ^eem 

 to be evidences of the unfitness of the Antillean environment for vci'te- 

 brate life rather than of any special distinctness of the Antilles from the 

 standpoint of geographic distribution. 



It seems almost pedantic to point out the necessity of consideriiiii- on- 



