I. — New England Spiders of the family Theridid.e. By J. H. Emerton. Of the 134 species here clescriberl, 89 species are from Eastern Massachusetts, collected in Boston and the towns west and soutli of it, in Lynn, Salem, Beverly and the adjoining towns. In this neigh-borhood I collected for several j^ears at all seasons, so that this num-ber probably includes nearly all the common and larger species, but of the smaller spiders, Ceratinella, Lophocaremini, Tmetlcas and 3IiGroneta, new kinds are found in almost every new locality ex-plored, and it is probable that twice as many species of this family will sooner or later be found here. Farther east I have spiders from Portland and Eastport, Maine, and farther west from Mt. Tom in Ilolyoke, Mass., and Albany, N. Y., nearly all of them the same species as found in Eastern Massachusetts. Farther north I have a few from Montreal, Canada, and 43 s|)ecies from the White Moun-tains, N. H., where I made large collections in the summers of 1874 and 1877. Of these, 23 species have not been found elsewhere in New England. They nearly all belong to the smaller genera and live in the damp moss on the slopes of the higher mountains. The spiders found in the valleys of the White Mountains differ but little from those of Massachusetts. I have hardly any spiders from the other parts of New Hampshire, Vermont, or the north of Maine. From the southern part of New England I have a few from Wood's Holl and Martha's Vineyard, Mass., and Newport and Providence, R. I., and 68 species from New Haven, Conn., of which 13 species have not been found elsewhere. I have seen but few spiders of this family from other parts of the country, most collections containing very few species of them, so that I am not sure of the range of a single species. Many New England species were found by Hentz in the Southern States, and other localities are mentioned under the various species, as far as I know them. The principal descriptive work on North American spiders is that of Hentz in the Journal of the Boston Society of Natural History, vols, iv, V and vi, reprinted in occasional papers of Boston Soc. of Nat. Hist., No. 2, 1875. In these papers a considerable number of Trans. Conn. Acad., Vol. VI. 1 Sept., 1882.
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