336 MOTIONS OF INSECTS. 



the creation, liave been in the habit of sailing through 

 the fields of ether in these air-light chariots ! 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 by the autumnal sun, 

 That boils the dew that on the earth doth lie, 

 May seem this whitish rug then is the scum ; 

 Unless that wiser men make't the Jield-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 

 gentleman, in fine serene weather in September, had 

 noticed these webs falling from the heavens, and in 

 them discovered more than once a spider, which he 

 named the bird. On another occasion, whilst he was 

 watching the proceedings of a common spider, the ani- 

 mal suddenly turning 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 after- 

 wards confirmed this extraordinary fact; and he fur- 

 ther 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 



* Quoted in the AthcncEum, v. 126. " Ray's Letters, 69. 36 — 



