Savory - Arachnida 1977

31
Historical Arachnology
The history of the Arachnida begins with the myths and legends of
ancient times. Ovid preserved for us the story of Arachne's contest
with Pallas Athene; the scorpion occupies a place in the Zodiac and
has associations with Mithras of Persia and Isis of Egypt; both spider
and scorpion played their parts in the rites of ancient China.
Aristotle (384-322 B.c.) omniscient philosopher and founder of
modern scientific method, made in his writings nearly 50 references to
different arachnids. Scorpions are described as producing living young,
contrasting with the spiders, that lay eggs. "The scorpion" he wrote "is
provided with claws, as also is the creature like a scorpion that is found
among the pages of books"; the first known reference to the pseudoscorpions.
Spiders received much fuller treatment; he noted the apparent
rarity of males, saw something of courtship and wrote freely
about their webs and their habits.
Pliny (A.D. 23-79) was more eloquent about scorpions than about
spiders. He mentioned the occasional appearance of freaks with two
tails, and was the first to use the names Tetragnatha and Solpuga. In
oth~r works of the first few centuries of our era there are also to be read
such names as Lycosa, :Vfygale, Rhax and Phalangium though it is not
possible to be sure what animals these were.
Rome fell in A.D. 395, and for more than a thousand years the history
of arachnology made little progress. Coelius Curio \\TOte in 1544
"Araneus, seu de Providentiae Dei" a sermon, and the first book to be
concerned only with spiders. Pierre Belon ( 151 7-64), whose travel-book
was published in Paris in I was the first since Aristotle to base his
writings on his own observations. The well-known work of Thomas
:Vfoffett ( 1553-1604) was the first book in which Araneus diadematus was
recognizably described and illustrated.
In the meanwhile, mankind's chief concern with spiders was con~
fined to the notorious tarantula (see Chapter 34).
31. HISTORICAl, ARACHNOLOGY 259
A period of about a century and a half, from 1650 to 1800, may be
described as the time of
of arachnology.
The great Robert Hooke (1635-1703), one ofthe pioneers ofmicro~
scopy, recorded his observations in "Micrographia", published in 1665.
One paragraph refers to "a crab~ like insect" that he had noticed in a book
that he was reading. His microscope showed him that it had "ten legs
two of which were like crab's claws". His drawing makes it evident that
he was looking at a of Cheiridium museorum. He also described at
some length "the Shepherd Spider" (Phalangium opilio), comparing it
with a crab and calling it Cancer aereus, an air crab.
Hooke was followed by Martin Lister ( 1638-1 712), compiler of the
first list of British spiders and the author of the first book to be written
about spiders in English. He was a physician who numbered Charles II
and Queen Anne among his patients, and was elected FRS in 1672. He
may be said to founded the tradition, maintained in Britain almost
until today, that our arachnologists be doctors, clergymen, chemists,
schoolmaster, anything rather than professional zoologists.
His book, "Historiae Animalium Angliae", was published in 1678 and
described 34 of spiders and three harvestmen, nearly all of which
are dearly recognizable. He was the first to notice the differences in
spiders' eyes, and the first to describe their chelicerae and the swelling
of the male palp. He made the first reference to the little red mites that
cling to harvestmen's legs.
Contemporaries ofHooke and Lister were Jan Swammerdam (1637-
80) and Anthony van Leeuwenhoek ( 1632-1723), in Holland. The
former discovered the keen eyesight of jumping-spiders and the attach~
ment of female wolf spiders to their cocoons, and, more important, he
wrote the first description of the use of the pal pal organ in male spiders.
Leeuwenhoek looked through his microscope at the claws on spider's
legs and at their chelicerae, and he ga\-e us the first reasonable des~
cription of their spinnerets. The period of adolescence ended with the
work of Clerck in Svveden.
Carl Alexander Clerck ( 1709-65) vvas a civil servant in Stockholm.
In 1737 he attended a course of lectures given by Linnaeus, that so
roused his interest that he made the acquaintance of the lecturer and
devoted his leisure to spiders and butterflies. In 1757 he published
"Svenska Spindlar'", in which he described 70 species of spiders, one
harvestman and two false scorpions. The names that he gave to these
were in theory to be replaced by those used by Linnaeus in the famous
tenth edition of the "Systema :'\Taturae" a year later, but because they
had been so generally popular throughout Europe they were officially
recognized by petition to the Zoological of 1953. Clerck's book