Monograph of the British Phalangidea or harvest men / by O. Pickard-Cambridge.

  • Pickard-Cambridge, Octavius, 1828-1917.
Date:
1890
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Monograph of the British Phalangidea or harvest men / by O. Pickard-Cambridge. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    14/136
    cens, is certainly no more than a small, and perhaps local, form of Phalangium cornutum; and another, Phalangium minutum Meade, appears to he a very doubtful species, leaving fourteen only certainly known to be British at that time. • To these I am able now to add nine others, and I do not doubt hut that if these groups were fairly worked, especially along our South-Eastern, Southern, and South- Western Coasts, the twenty-four species here described would he materially added to. In recommending our entomologists to turn a wider attention to the Phalangidea, I may observe that besides being a group of animals of very remarkable details of structure, they have nothing whatever disgusting or objectionable about them, but are particularly interesting and cleanly in their ways and quite inoffensive, possessed of no venom, and doing no injury to man or any of his possessions; rather, on the contrary, by preying upon the insect world, doing him good. Of the twenty-four British Phalangids twenty-one have been found by myself in Dorsetshire, two of the remaining three being Alpine forms, and one a doubtful species. DESCRIPTIONS OF GENERA AND SPECIES. CLASS ARACHNID A. ORDER Phalangidea (Cambr.) Opiliones (Sundeval, Simon). Plate A. Ceplialothorax (consisting of the caput and thorax) forms a single portion on which there are usually grooves, sutures, or impressed lines more or less distinctly marking the segments composing it. In some pristine form no doubt these segments, like those similarly soldered together in the corresponding portion of the true spiders, were separated and free, but in the existing forms the progress of development has crowded them up together, not only to the extent of coalescence, but almost to the obliteration of any trace of their once separate existence. Abdomen segmented; fitting up and imited to the ceplialothorax throughout its width, having been evidently acted upon by the same causes as those which crushed up the segment of the thorax into the caput. The segments of the abdomen are not the same