Article beginning on page 113.
Psyche 5:113-114, 1888.

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September-October 1888.1 PSYCHE. 113
building material and as it reached the
wall it turned and exuded a drop of
inucilagino~~s fluid from the abdomen
then whii led instantly about and de-
posited its fibers upon it as it lay on the wall, mixing and moulding the mass
with its jaws. This pulp had about
the consistency of papier inache and
was readily manipulated forming a wall
of about the thickness of heavy writing
paper. This hardens rapidly, but
remains pliable for some time, thus the
walls on the extieme outer edge of the
newly erected portion could be bent
without breaking, whereas the oklei
portions are quite brittle.
As the orifice on which the ants were
employed grew smaller, fewer and
fewer could find room, yet tLeie was
no crowding, each keepi12g his ac-
custo~ned distance fi oin his fellows, so one after another they disappeai ed, as
I watched, until but one was left to
complete the minute hole remaining.
These ants are veiy destructive to
buildings, especially to the small houses of the negi os, and when the} have once
obtained a foothold the house is doomed. I knew of a small house in the neigh-
borhood of Nassau that had not been
occupied for a year or two that was
WALCKENAER'S NAMES
BY JAMES HENRY EME
Mr. Henry C. McCook has called
attention in the Proceedings of the Phil- adelphia Acad. of Nat. Sciences to the
names of American spiders published
by Wiilckenaer, and the necessity of
two-thirds devoured by them. There
was a nest on the roof, supported by
the rafters, around which all the shingles had disappeared, while others were
much eaten and all the posts were thickly perforated with their galleiies. Such
was the speed wit11 which the ants
worked, through industry and numbers,
that the eroded surfaces appeared quite
fresh, being of nearly the color of newly cut wood. The owner of this house
informed me that he had destroyed
every trace of the nest many times only
to see it rebuilt, as fast as the ants
could construct it.
[NOTE. Unfortunately Mr. Maynard
did not preserve specimens of this
termite for indentification and Dr.
Hagen in his Monographic der Termiten
does not mention any species from the
Bahamas. In 1883 Mr. B. H. Van
Vleck collected large numbers of Eu-
terms rifferti at Nassau, and Mr.
Maynard's observations undoubtedly
refer to this species, which is common
upon many of the West Indian islands
and in South America. See, Pioc.
Bost. Soc. Nat. Hist., December 1877
v. 19, p. 267-274 for Notes on the tree
nests of Termites in Jamaica by H. G.
Hubbard.-S : H.]
OF AMERICAN SPIDERS.
RTON, BOSTON, MASS.
using them in place of latter names
given by Hentz and others.
There is no doubt that as far as these
names can be identified with certainty
and shown to be the oldest, they ought




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[September-October 1888
to be used for the species to which they belong but the difficulty is, as Mr.
McCook shows in this article, in their
identification.
Walckenaer, as is well known, never
saw the American spiders that he
named. He bought a large number of
drawings of spiders made in Georgia
by John Abbot and published des-
criptions of the drawing's, so that the
first step in identifying Walckenaer
names is to identify the drawings by
Abbot.
The only known drawings of spiclei s
by Abbot Eire in the library of the
British Museum where they have been
for a long time and have been shown
to any person interested in them. These
are probably the same drawings used
by Walckenaer as Mr. McCook has
compared the numbers and notes upon
them with those referred to in Walck-
enaer's descriptions of similar spiders
and found them to be the same.
Mr. TvIcCooI< is inclined, however, to
set too high a value on these drawings,
for although his engagements prevented
"him giving more than an hour or two
to the study of the figures," and as far as mentioned, no American spiders
were compared directly with them, he
undertook to identify, off hand, a con-
siderable number of them, a partial list of which he gives in this article with
the revised names by which, as he says,
"they must hereafter be known if
Walclcenaer's names are to be ac-
cepted ."
In 18n I looked over these same
drawings at the British Museum and
like Mr. McCook made hasty identifica-
tions of such few of them as I could.
In my notes made at the time I find the
following list.
4. Epeira placida Hentz.
54. Linyphia communis Hentz.
55- Young Linyphia ~nar~no-
rata Hentz,
65.
Mi~biona gracilis Hentz.
77,78. Uloborus.
79,80. Epeira calldata Hentz.
I 17. Epeira thaddeus Hentz.
I 16. Epeira insularis Hentz.
121. Epeira insularis.
123. Theridion sphaemla Hentz.
5.56- Epeira insnlaris.
A comparison of the numbers shows
that only five of these identifications
agree with those of McCook showing
the uncertainty of off hand identifica-
tions of these drawings by two persons
both familiar with the common spiders
of the northern states.
The greater number of Abbot's
drawings represent 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 iden-
tified. At any rate this cannot be done
until the spiders of the southern states have become better known. An attempt
now to apply as many as possible of
Walckenaer's names to any spiders that
his descriptions or Abbot's drawings
may possibly belong to, will only in-
crease the number of uncertain names
in use and so i\dd to the labor of every future student of the subject. After the common spiders all over the United
States have been described and are
known to several students it will be
possible to compare them with the
descriptions of Walckenaer, Koch and
Hentz with some prospect of finding
out what these old descriptions are
reallv worth and how many of them can
be referred with certainty to particular species of spiders. With the present
small number of stndents of American
spiders it seems to me safer for each to use such names as appear to him the
most certain even if not the oldest and
leave the law of propriety and the
"credit of entitulation" to take care of themselves.




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