182 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences , Arts , md Letters. 
tory. W. H. Hudson tells of how he once found a band of 
gossamer on the ground, twenty yards wide and more than 
two miles long, so thickly covered with spiders that were at- 
tempting to fly that they were unable to get off comfortably. 
As soon as one threw out its lines they became entangled with 
those of another, lanced out at the same moment, but notwith¬ 
standing this difficulty numbers were continually floating off 
on the breeze. 1 
In the light of these facts it seems probable that Madagascar 
received its spider fauna from Africa, two hundred and fifty 
miles away. While it has some affinities with the Oriental 
Region, they are not of sufficient importance to require the hy¬ 
pothesis of an intervening continent. 
In Psyche for April 1902, we published descriptions of some 
South African Attidae, without illustrations. These descrip¬ 
tions are repeated below, with figures illustrating the genera 
and species. 
SOUTH AFRICAN ATTIDAE. 
PLUUIDEXTATI. 
Macopaeus madagascarensis sp. nov. 
Plate XIX, fig. 5. 
9. Length 4.5 mm. Legs 423, first pair missing; metatarsi 
and tarsi very slender. 
We have one badly damaged specimen. The eyerregion is 
covered with long bright red hairs, the rest of the cephalotho- 
rax being rubbed bare excepting a white band which runs 
around the mjargin and across the clypeus. The brown falcea 
are, on the front faces, thickly set with short, stiff, project¬ 
ing white hairs. The abdomen is dark, with a lighter patch 
on each side in front, and seemis to have been covered with 
beautiful iridescent scales, the reflections being purple and 
blue. The legs are long and not especially slender, excepting 
the terminal joints; they are brown and show patches of the 
i Naturalist in La Plata, p. 186. 
