Spiders. 143 



they go till they find some place where they think they 

 would like to settle down and build up a practice. It is 

 these threads of young adventurers that you feel across 

 your face late in the summer. \Yhen Mr. Darwin was on 

 board the Beagle sixty miles from land, near the mouth 

 of the La Plata, the ship's rigging was covered with 

 them. He never saw a spider come to the deck on a 

 mass of web, which some people suppose they fly on, but 

 always at the end of one thread. 



It is a curious fact that these floating threads will take 

 the bluing off a gun barrel. I have been unable to find 

 out why. The threads of the big tropical spiders are dis- 

 tinctly bitter to the taste, but though the first thought a 

 man has when he tastes anything bitter is that it must be 

 good, for medicine, the only use the healing art makes of 

 spiders' webs is to use them to stanch the flow of blood. 

 The kind of web used for thai- grows under the counters 

 of groceries, and it was one of these spiders that caught 

 a mouse. I will admit, right in the beginning, that this 

 looks like a pretty large story, but it is substantiated by 

 no less a personage than the late Proctor Knott, who 

 was then Governor of Kentucky, though his greater 

 claim to fame is his speech in Congress about Duluth, 

 ' the zenith city of the unsalted seas," as he humorously 

 called it, which is very far indeed from being anything 

 nowadays but a plain statement of fact, as he lived to 

 see. Governor Knott made a signed statement of the 

 event and sent it to Professor McCook, whose au- 

 thority on the spider question nobody will dispute. He 

 saw the spicier shortly after she had snared the mouse by 

 the end of its tail, and while it was still alive and strug- 

 gling halfway off the ground, and he saw it after it had 

 been hoisted nine inches from the floor and all wrapped 

 up in silk. He calls particular attention to the way the 



