Savory - Arachnida 1977

296 IV. DE ARACHNOLOGIA
Simou meant by "true", or to have realized that he was too sound a
scholar to have written anything so foolish. If his successors had
remembered the Latin that they learnt at school, or, in the absence of
such a luxury, had looked at a dictionary, they would have found that
Araneac verae should properly be translated as "ordinary spiders".
By thus contrasting the familiar spiders of the countryside with the fourlunged
diggers of silk-lined burrows, Simon was making a clear and
sensible distinction.
In 1892 Pocock gave the Araneae verae the name of Arachnomorphae.
This was almost invariably used until 1933, when it was criticized on
the grounds that it might lead to confusion with the name of the class. It
was displaced by Araneomorphae, which empirically is as likely to be
confused with the name of the genus Araneus. It is also one of the obnoxious
hybrids that too often come into misshapen existence, and should
never have been allowed to appear in print. Arachnologists, like other
scientists, are often compelled to make new words, and they should be
encouraged to make them well, not badly. There is no merit in deliberate
malpractice.
Some authors have taken to writing "1\:lygalomorpha" and "Arachnomorpha".
Now morphe makes the plural morphai, which can only be
transliterated into -morphae. V\'hat mental kink suggested this change is
obscure.
A similar step has been taken by those who have written "Cribellata"
and "Ecribellata", saying that these spellings are "preferable" to the
usual Cribellatae and Ecribellatac. No reason for the preference is
given. The words can, of course, only be construed as adjectives, qualifying
the noun araneae, understood. Araneae cribellatae is analogous to
Simon's Araneac verae. Long-standing custom has justified the dropping
of the noun: we speak, for example, of gastritis, arthritis and so on,
when these words were originally adjectives, qualii)ring nosos, a disease.
Gastritis nosos meant a disease affecting the stomach. To put these
words into the form suggested is pointless, or worse, since Cribellata, by
itself, can only mean either "a small-sieved woman" or "small-sieved
things", and l\:lygalomorpha means nothing, except that the writer,
like Shakespeare, had little Latin and less Greek.
The cribellum seems to have been devised by a malicious evolutionary
jinx to give trouble to arachnologists. The organ is to be described
as a small sieve, and the Latin for sieve is cribrum. Diminutives in Latin
are made by adding the suffix -ulus, as in puerulus, a little boy, or -cellus,
as in navicella, a little ship. This cribrum might give either cribulum
or cribrellum, and certain authors have, in fact, used the latter form.
There is, however, sufficient precedence for the dropping of the second
r, most familiarly in the word cerebellum, a little brain, from cerebrum, a
35. LINGUISTIC ARACHNOLOGY 297
brain. I have never seen the word cerebrellum, and do not think that
cribrellum is to be encouraged.
The spinneret, metaphorically described as thele, a teat, produces
another curiosity. There are two genera of spiders whose names indicate
that they possess six and seven spinnerets respectively. One of these has
been named Hexathele and the other Heptathela. The former is an
exact transliteration of the Greek, but leaves the word in the singular,
"six-spinneret". The latter has converted the Greek into the latinizcd
form thela, and so has produced a hybrid that might better ha\·e been
written Septemthela.
A word that suffers from uncertainty in the minds of its users is
sensillus. It may be found with all possible spellings as sensillus, sensilla
and sensillum. In one standard textbook it appears in the text as sensillum
with its plural sensilla, which in the legend to the text figure
becomes sensillae ( !)
The word seems to be a diminutive from sensus. The suffix -illus is an
alternative to -ulus or to -ellus, rather less commonly used; but compare
putus, which makes putillus, a little boy. It follows that the correct word is
sensillus, plural sensilli; other forms, including "sensor" are to be avoided.
The matter of inconsistency or of unexplained changes has been mentioned
by Kaston (1974). He instances the names that Petrunkevitch
gave to some of the higher taxa: the Dionycha and Trionycha of 1928
became Dionychae and Trionychae in 1933 and again Dionychi and
Trionychi in 1955. Similarly, the Hypochilomorphae and Quadrostiatae
of 1933 appeared in 1958 as H ypochilina and Quadrostiati. Kaston
concludes,·,"! am unable to suggest an explanation of all these changes".
The preceding paragraphs seem to justify the sneer that since scientists
are traditionally supposed to be unable to write good English, it is
unrealistic to expect them to write good Latin, or even to write Latin at
all if they can manage to avoid it. This is achieved by the habit of
anglicizing the names of taxa by dropping the final syllable. Thus we
read of "liphistiid spiders", spelt with a small l or of "galeodids'',
"gongyleptids" and so on, throughout the whole of arachnid taxonomy.
The device may be meant to ease the acceptance of strange names:
perhaps it does so.
The high reputation of a science such as ours deserves, in every respect
nothing but the best. Are we not arachnologists?
Are we? "Arachnology" must, from its derivation, be the science or
study of spiders: the word cannot accurately be applied to students of
scorpions, harvestmen or any of the other orders. The comprehensive
science should be "arachnidology", a word which, I am glad to say, I
have seen in print only once. Few of us are arachnidologists; most of us
wisely limit ourselns to the one order that particularly fascinates us.