GOSSAMER. 219 



webs should at once become so gross and material 

 as to be considerably more weighty than air, and to 

 descend with precipitation, is a matter beyond my 

 skill. If I might be allowed to hazard a supposition, 

 I should imagine that those filmy threads, when first 

 shot, might be entangled in the rising dew, and so 

 draw up, spiders and all, by a brisk evaporation, into 

 the regions where clouds are formed ; and if the 

 spiders have a power of coiling and thickening their 

 webs in the air, as Dr. Lister says they have, [see his 

 Letters to Mr. Ray,] then, when they were become 

 heavier than the air, they must fall. 



Every day in fine weather, in autumn chiefly, do 

 I see those spiders shooting out their webs and 

 mounting aloft : they will go off from your finger, 

 if you will take them into your hand. Last summer 

 one alighted on my book as I was reading in the 

 parlour; and, running to the top of the page, and 

 shooting out a web, took his departure from thence. 

 But what I most wondered at was, that it went off 

 with considerable velocity in a place where no air 

 was stirring ; and I am sure that I did not assist it 

 with my breath. So that these little crawlers seem 

 to have, while mounting, some locomotive power 

 without the use of wings, and to move in the air 

 faster than the air itself. 



LETTER LXVI. 



TO THE SAME. 



SELBORNE, Aug. 15, 1775. 

 DEAR SIR, 



THERE is a wonderful spirit of sociality in the 

 brute creation, independent of sexual attachment : 



