A Descriptive Catalogue of the Phalangiinae of Illinois

Abstract

The great majority of the American species of those familiar creatures commonly known as ''harvest-men " or "daddy-long-legs" (not to be confounded with the crane-flies— Tipulida'—which go by by the latter name in Europe) belong to the subfamily PJialangiind' of the family Phalangi(Ja> of the suborder Opilonea and order Arthrogastra. Though abundant and widely distributed, these arachnids have as yet received comparatively little attention in this country. The first American descriptions were published by Thomas Say in 1821 (Jour. Phil. Acad. Nat. Sci., Vol. IT., pp. 65-68), when four species were characterized under the genus Phalangium. Besides the above the only descriptive paper that has appeared is that by Dr. Horatio C. Wood, Jr., entitled "On the Phalangese of the United States of America," which was published in 1868 in the Communications of the Essex Institute (Vol. VI., pp. 10-40). In 1885, Prof. L. M. Underwood published a list of the described species (Canadian Entomologist, Vol. XVI., pp. 167-160), but added nothing to our knowledge of the group. Finally, in the "American Naturalist" for October, 1887 (Vol. XXL, p. 935), the present writer published a brief note calling attention to the proper generic position of several species hitherto retained in the old genus Phalangium.