OCR Text |
Show 1876.] REV. O. P. CAMBRIDGE ON EGYPTIAN SPIDERS. 567 found in old buildings and under large stones at Alexandria and Cairo. A strong specific character, not before recorded, so far as I am aware, of the adult male, is furnished by a single longitudinal closely set row of short but distinct and rather strong black spines, reaching from near the base on the underside of the femora nearly to the anterior extremity of the tibiae of the first pair of legs. This Spider, described by Mr. Blackwall (Pholcus ruralis, I. c. supra), is probably of this species. Fam. THERIDIIDES. Gen. LATRODECTUS, Walck. LATRODECTUS EREBUS. Latrodectus erebus, Sav. Egypte, pl. iii. fig. 9. Adult females, with their large globular brown egg-cocoons, were found under stones among the ruins of an old building at Alexandria. Dr. Thorell (Europ. Spiders, p. 95) rejects the derivation of Walckenaer's generic name Latrodectus from Xdrpov, wages or reward, and hacros, received, as yielding no rational meaning for the name, and thence derives it from Xddpa, secretly, and ZTIKTYIS, biting. Those, however, who have looked most closely into the derivations of names given to genera and species of animals know best how very little rational meaning there is in a large number of them, in cases where the derivation is almost, and sometimes absolutely, certain. In a well-known instance a species of Lepidoptera was named by a British author " decimella," merely because he had pinned it with a number-tew pin. Another instance is furnished by Baron Walckenaer himself, who named a Spider " Carolinum " for (there is no doubt) the excellent reason (?) that it had been found by his little son Charles (Carolus). Rather than impute to the Baron the manifest impropriety of writing Latrodectus, if he had really derived it from XaQpa, I would suppose that he had some reason to look upon the discovery of the type of his genus as the happy result of some trouble or difficulty, and thus gave it the name (rightly written Latrodectus) from the Greek words given as its derivation by Agassiz (Nomencl. Zool.) and rejected by Dr. Thorell, i. e. Xarpos (a form of kurpop), wages or reward, and Scicros, one meaning of w*hich is acceptable. If this be "no rational meaning for the word," it appears to be, at any rate, more probable than the derivation given by Dr. Thorell. The derivation given by M. Simon, Hist, des Araignees, p. 177 (also rejected as irrational by Dr. T.), from Xdrpevs, a workman, and cjnKrijs, a biter, would not be improbable, since we find that Walckenaer (Araneides de France, p. 81, where he confers the name) remarks especially on the manner in which the Spider spins its snares for the entrapping of its prey beneath the stones. |