54 
Psyche 
[June- September 
are in other institutions, several at the Houghton Library of Harvard 
University. According to Chamberlin and Ivie (1944), Walckenaer 
purchased drawings from the entomologist Mackay. In the eighteen 
forties Walckenaer named and described some of the drawings of 
the 1792 Abbot volume (now in the British Museum), in Histoire 
Naturelles des Insects Apteres. There is some doubt about the date 
of publication of Walckenaer’s second volume. Our personal volume 
has two inscriptions, one of Walckenaer, addressed to Mr. Adam 
White and dated 4 June 1841, and another presumably in White’s 
handwriting: “Adam White Villeneuve, St. Germ. Walckenaer’s 
study June 7, 1841.” Thus the publication date is undoubtedly 1841, 
not 1842 as stated by Chamberlin and Ivie and Bonnet (1945). 
Dr. McCook visited the British Museum in 1887 and his atten- 
tion was called to the Abbot drawings of American spiders. In a 
report to the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences (1888a), he discussed 
some of the questions raised by this discovery. McCook was much 
concerned about the changing of names in use, but he also wanted 
to credit the earliest author: “the laws of priority must be con- 
sidered, and honesty and justice can give no room for considerations 
of convenience and sentiment.” Several argiopid names of Hentz 
were identified with those of Walckenaer. 
McCook’s paper was reviewed by Emerton (1888). Emerton had 
looked over the Abbot drawings at the time of his visit to the British 
Museum in 1875, “and like Mr. McCook made hasty identifications 
of such few of them as I could. ... A comparison of the numbers 
shows that only five of these identifications agree with those of Mc- 
Cook showing the uncertainty of off-hand identifications of these 
drawings by two persons both familiar with the common spiders of 
the northern states. The greater number of Abbot’s drawings repre- 
sent the spiders only in the most general and indefinite way and it 
seems to me improbable that any large number of them can ever be 
identified.” 
Included in McCook’s self defense (1888b) were excerpts from 
a congratulatory letter from Thorell. Banks followed: “The de- 
scriptions of new species in Walckenaer’s Insectes Apteres fall into 
two classes: descriptions based on specimens, and descriptions based 
on figures. The former class are undoubtedly valid and I intend to 
accept them wherever I can apply them. Descriptions of figures, 
however, I hold, have no claim on the naturalist. Not only are they 
based on figures, but the figures have never been published. Many 
of the descriptions are sufficient for identification, but most are not. 
