378 



ON ERIGONE SPINOSA CAMBR. 



A Spider new to the British Fauna. 



Rev. O. PICKARD-CAMBRIDGE, M.A., F.R.S., etc. 



Order Araneidea. 

 Fam. Theridiid.e. 

 Genus Erigone Sav. 

 Erigone spinosa Camb. ' Proc. Zool. Soc. of London,' 1872. 



page 292, pi. xiii., fig. 12. 

 Syn. Erigone vagans Sim. (non Erigone vagans And. & Sav.).. 

 ' Les Araclinides de France,' Vol. V., p. 530, 1881. 

 Figs. 330-331. 



Few additions of spiders to our British list have been 

 less expected, or more welcome to me than the one above 

 named. It was almost the first species I bottled on my arrival 

 at Cairo, in January 1864. Others were subsequently found 

 there, and at Alexandria ; and I met with it in the following 

 year in Palestine, on the road between Jezreel and Nazareth, 

 and afterwards at Rome. Mons. Simon also sent it to miC in 

 1871 from the neighbourhood of Paris, and I now find both 

 sexes of it among other spiders kindly collected for me on 

 Saltend Common, a few miles from Hull, by Mr. T. Stainforth, 

 of the Hull Municipal Museum. The genus Erigom Sav. is 

 one of the best marked, and most compact among our small 

 spiders ; its British representatives are few — five only, as 

 recorded at present, not counting the one now under considera- 

 tion — and among them are two of our most abundant spiders. 

 The mxost casual observer would hardly fa.il to recognise the 

 adult males in this group by their black hue, bright yellow- 

 brown or orange legs, and excessively long palpi. The species 

 are most numerous in Alpine and sub-alpine regions. They 

 reach northward in Europe from Cairo to the extreme arctic 

 line, and there are several species also recorded in North 

 America. While, however, the males are tolerably easy to 

 identify, the females are — some, at any rate — difficult to 

 separate. Of the five already recorded British species, four 

 are found in the same locality as the one now recorded, and 

 the fifth in another Yorkshire locality ; but the present 

 species — E. spinosa — may easily be distinguished in the male 

 sex by its bright orange-red falces, palpi and femoral leg-joints, 

 the colour in these last forming a ver^^ strong contrast with the 

 pale yellow-brown anterior joints. No other species known to 

 me has the above-mentioned parts of the same red-tint. When 

 examined closely, also, the form and direction of a strong 

 prominent spur beneath the fore extremity of the third or 

 cubital joint makes it a very easy one to identify. In all 

 other known species, so far as I am aware, this spur is straight, 

 more cr less subcorneal in form, and projects downwards either 



Naturalist, 



