1961] 
Levi and Levi — American Spiders 
55 
But no matter how complete, they are not descriptions of spiders; 
but of figures of spiders. They rank with ‘hearsay evidence’. I shall 
not use them nor list them ; I shall ignore them.” 
Chamberlin and Ivie (1944) undertook “initially to determine, as 
far as possible from available evidence, the proper application of the 
names based by Walckenaer upon Abbot’s drawings of the spiders 
of Georgia.” Chamberlin made color photographs of Abbot’s drawings 
at the time of a London visit, and Ivie spent a month in April 1943 
collecting spiders in Georgia. Some other collections were obtained 
during brief stops in Georgia in August 1933 and June 1935. Cham- 
berlin and Ivie listed the collections (including many determined 
juveniles), and synonymized many well established spider names of 
many families with names of Walckenaer. 
However, in our own examination of the Abbot manuscript draw- 
ings, we found that the majority do not show diagnostic characters; 
interpretation must be subjective, and authors may differ. For in- 
stance, McCook synonymized the name T etragnatha lacerta Walck- 
enaer with T etragnatha caudata Emerton ; Chamberlin and Ivie 
synonymized the same name with Rhomphaea fictilium (Hentz), of 
a different family. Most of McCook’s synonymies concerned argiopid 
spiders that have a characteristic dorsal abdominal pattern. However 
a modern author has to consider the possibility of sympatric sibling 
species. 
Further, and to be expected, students working with groups never 
revised make errors in identification. Thus Chamberlin and Ivie 
synonymized Argyrodes trigonum (Hentz) with Linyphia rufa 
Walckenaer. However, the specimens so labelled were not Hentz’s 
species, but were Argyrodes furcatus (O.P.-Cambridge) , a species 
more common in Georgia. Tidarren fordum (Keyserling) was syn- 
onymized with Theridion sisyphoides Walckenaer, but specimens so 
labelled were not Tidarren fordum. Female specimens of Theridion 
alahamense Gertsch and Archer were misidentified as Theridion amer- 
icanum Walckenaer, and the male was described as new. Walckenaer’s 
description of T. americanum does not fit T. alabamense. Figure 43, 
Walckenaer’s Theridion ansatum , was not recognized as the species 
otherwise called Tidarren sisyphoides (Walckenaer), easily recog- 
nized by the white line on the posterior part of the abdomen. Probably 
half the examined theridiids of the Chamberlin and Ivie Georgia col- 
lection had incorrect identifications, and the same may be true of 
specimens of other families. While these errors can easily be under- 
stood, they invalidate many of the synonymies of Walckenaer’s names. 
