332 MOTIONS OF INSECTS. 



This seems to have been suspected long ago by Henry 

 Moore, who says, 



" As light and thin as cobwebs that do fly 

 In the blew air, caus'd bj' the autumnal sun. 

 That boils the dew that on the earth doth lie, 

 May seem this whitish rag then is the scum ; 



Unless that wiser men make't the field-spider'' s loom^ ." 



Where he also alludes to the old opinion of scorched 

 dew. But the first naturalists who made this discovery 

 appear to have been Dr. Hulse and Dr. Martin Lister — 

 the former first observing that spiders shoot their webs 

 into the air ; and the latter, besides this, that they were 

 carried upon them in that element'^. This last gentle- 

 man, in fine serene weather in September, had noticed 

 these webs falling from the heavens, and in them disco- 

 vered more than once a spider, which he named the bird. 

 On another occasion, whilst he was watching the pro- 

 ceedings of a common spider, the animal suddenly turn- 

 ing upon its back and elevating its anus, darted forth a 

 long thread, and vaulting from the place on which it 

 stood, was carried upwards to a considerable height. 

 Numerous observations afterwards confirmed this extra- 

 ordinary fact ; and he further discovered, that while they 

 fly in this manner, they pull in their long thread with 

 their fore feet, so as to form it into a ball — or, as we 

 may call it, air-balloon — of flake. The height to which 

 spiders will thus ascend he affirms is prodigious. One 

 day in the autumn, when the air was full of webs, he 

 mounted to the top of the highest steeple of York minster, 

 from whence he could discern tlie floating webs still very 



* Quoted in tiie Athenccum, v. 126. '' Hay's Letters, 69. 36 — . 



