DESCRIPTIONS OF NEW SOUTH AFRICAN SPIDERS. 
By John Hewitt, Director of the Albany Museum, Grahamstown. 
(With 9 text figures and plates XXVI and XXVII.) 
The material on which the following descriptions are founded is mainly 
contained in the collection of the Transvaal Museum and includes some 
particularly fine series of terricolous spiders obtained in the Pretoria 
District subsequent to the completion of my previous paper on this 
subject (Annals Trans. Mus., Vol. V, Part 2). The fact that each species 
is usually represented by a great number of specimens, all carefully 
located, has enabled me to work out the range of variation within a species 
and to gauge with some degree of confidence the value of each character. 
Such work is, of course, essential to ensure accuracy, yet it is safe to say 
that the majority of workers on trapdoor spiders have been obliged to 
describe most of their species from single specimens. Although our 
knowledge of the Arachnid fauna of that neighbourhood has been greatly 
increased through the extensive collections brought together by Messrs. 
Austin Roberts and G. van Dam, yet their discoveries around Pretoria 
can only be regarded as a minor part of the wealthy but almost unexplored 
fauna of the Transvaal. 
A few of the species here described are based on material in the Albany 
Museum, Grahamstown. 
Family ATYPIDAE. 
Calommata transvaalicus , sp. nov. (Plate XXVI, fig. 11 and text fig. 3.) 
The type of this species is a single female specimen, probably 
immature, collected at Roodeplaat, seventeen miles north-east of Pretoria, 
by Mr. G. van Dam (3rd April, 1915). It was found m grass veld, 
occupying a nest about 9 inches deep, lined inside with thick web, but 
not protected by a lid. 
The record is of considerable interest as hitherto no*members of this 
family have been known from South Africa. The genus Calommata , 
however, for a long time known only from Japan, Burmah, Java, and 
Sumatra, was recorded some years ago from the Cameroons by Mr. Pocock. 
In describing * the species there found, C. simoni, Mr. Pocock merely 
compared it with C. fulvipes Lucas, the genotype, apparently regarding the 
other three species described from Eastern Asia as synonyms of fulvipes. 
The description of the species is as follows : — 
Dentition of chelicerae. — The distal row on one side is composed of 
two teeth, and on the other side of only one tooth ; m the former case 
Ann. Mag. Nat. Hist., 7, XI, p. 259. 
