20 
Annals of the Transvaal Museum 
The following notes are taken from a little-known paper entitled 
‘'Some Arachnids at Hanover, Cape Colony/' by S. C. Cronwright- 
Schreiner, in the Popular Science Monthly for December 1902: “If you 
watch a Solpuga closely, you may see its sides palpitating rapidly, even 
violently, if you hold it in your hand. Like all active, high strung, quick 
breathing creatures, the Solifugae perish almost instantaneously when 
immersed in spirits, while large scorpions and large Harpactirae will live 
for two or three hours. They are great burrowers, but do not make 
regular holes apparently, and they lie dormant underground during the 
winter. They are a feature of the thirsty veld and the blazing sun. The 
‘Tommies' along the railway sometimes make one of these creatures 
fight with a scorpion. They place the combatants in some slippery vessel 
so that they cannot run out. The scorpion is nearly always much the 
larger and heavier and has in addition to its long arms and powerful 
nippers, a deadly sting. Yet it not infrequently happens that the jacht- 
spinnekop comes off victorious, for it seizes the scorpion in its terrible 
shears and tears a huge hole in it with a quickness and force against 
which the scorpion is often powerless. When one first sees a Solpuga on 
the veld, especially the commonest (S. chelicornis) , one can hardly believe 
it is not a beautiful karoo flower: touch it, and awa}/ it darts. The Dutch 
call them Jacht Spinnekoppen or Haar Scheerders. Jacht Spinnekop 
(hunting spider) is a very appropriate name, for, to the casual observer 
they resemble spiders, and they are mighty hunters. Haar Scheerder 
(hair shearer) is even more oppropriate. They are called Haar Scheerders 
because of their two enormous shears. Many a person believes that, if 
they get into your hair, you will not get them out again until they have 
shorn it all oh.'' 
The S. African solifuge fauna is noteworthy for the abundance of 
diurnal types. Text-books of Zoology and Natural History describe 
these creatures as wholly nocturnal, and indeed this seems to be actually 
the case in other parts of the world. In Dr F. Werner’s paper on, “Scor- 
pions and Allied annulated spiders of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan " and 
in Mr Pocock's account in the Fauna of British India, the whole fauna is 
represented as nocturnal. 
The following arrangement of the subfamilies and of the several 
genera in each subfamily has no claim to phylogenetic importance. The 
subfamily Solpuginae seems to be quite sharply separated from the other 
groups and I regard it as the most specialised. The Daesiinae constitute 
a natural group of which Daesia is probably the most specialised genus : 
this subfamily presents certain points of affinity with the Galeodidae. 
The Karschiinae have relationships therewith, yet are well worthy of 
distinction in my opinion, although Prof. Kraepelin finds difficulty in 
separating them from the Daesiinae: the subfamily includes the most 
primitive of S. African Solifugae, and indeed the genus Lipophaga would 
appear to be the most generalised of all known Solifugae. The very 
specialised Hexisopodinae are somewhat isolated and their affinities, 
obscure but it does not seem necessary to separate them as a family 
distinct from the Karschiinae and Daesiinae. 
