Art. Y. — A Contribution to our Knowledge of the Spiders of Victoria; including some New Sjpecies and Genera. By H. R. HOGG, M.A. (Plates XIII. to XVII.) [Eead 19th April, 1900]. The spiders from my own collection here dealt with have been taken almost wholly about the neighbourhood of Macedon, and may therefore be considered as fairly representative of the central portion of the Dividing Range of the colony of Victoria. The Australian spiders described by L. Koch and E. von Keyserling, our chief workers in the past, were mostly collected by the agents of Messrs. Godeffroy Brothers of Hamburg, from about their trading stations for produce in Queensland, New South Wales, and the Pacific islands ; they also include the work done by Mr. Bradley in New South Wales, Mr. Urquhart in New Zealand, and by Messrs. Thorell and 0. P. Cambridge, from desultory specimens, so that the southern portion of the conti-nent has remained more or less unworked. The Godeffroy collection, unhappily, was broken up some years ago, and no reliance can now be placed on the specimens' at times sold by dealers as L. Koch's types, but the National Museum of Victoria has a good representative set of named specimens, pur-chased many years ago therefrom, reputed to be types. Von Keyserling's collection is in the British Museum, and his types are available for comparison, but the Australian ones are com-paratively few in number, so that in determining species written descriptions have to be followed in the large majority of instances, leaving an unsatisfactory margin of liability to error even where, as in this case, they are so minutely and conscientiously detailed. The illustrations are fortunately very voluminous, and where I have been able to compare them with the originals, I have been imbued with great respect for the accuracy of the work.
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