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Psyche 
[December 
came interested in the study of spiders is a matter of specu- 
lation. However, as early as 1874, he was evidently familiar 
with a paper by the Rev. Octavius Pickhard-Cambridge, 
(1828-1917), of Devonshire, England, on certain minute Eu- 
ropean spiders, since early that same year he sent a collection 
of similar New England forms to Cambridge for study and 
identification. All these American forms were recognized as 
new and were described and figured by Cambridge in the 
Proceedings of the London Zoological Society for that year, 
1874. A second collection of similar material was sent by 
Emerton to Cambridge and was described and figured in the 
same journal in 1875. There can be little doubt that with 
Hentz as a model, Emerton made colored drawings of his 
material quite early. These have never been published. 
In 1875, Emerton went abroad, taking with him a portion 
of his New England material. Some time was passed at 
Leipzig and Jena in study but he continued to collect in the 
surrounding country. Later, in France, he met Eugene 
Simon, (1848-1924), who was to become the foremost 
arachnologist of his time. From this contact, a life long 
friendship began. Together they made collecting excursions 
in the vicinity of Paris, and many specimens from Simon 
were added to Emerton’s European collection, including 
material from the Pyrenees and Corsica recently described 
by Simon. 
As early as 1864, Simon, then sixteen years of age, had 
published a comprehensive work on spiders under the title 
of “Histoire Naturelle des Araignees” and was already oc- 
cupied with his monumental “Les Arachnides de France” 
dating from the year 1874. It is perhaps to Simon’s example 
and probable suggestion, that we are indebted for one of the 
least known of Emerton’s writings, “A Comparison of the 
Spiders of Europe and North America”, a short paper pub- 
lished in 1877, in the Proceedings of the Boston Society of 
Natural History, vol. XIX. In 1882, the first of his syste- 
matic studies, “The New England Spiders of the Family 
Theridiidse” appeared in the Transactions of the Connecticut 
Academy of Arts and Sciences. The series was continued 
at irregular intervals in the same publication until 1915. 
In 1904, the Boston Society of Natural History published 
