APPENDIX. 49 



part with one. Seize the sack of eggs containing her posterity, she 

 runs away a few steps, pauses, and returns to look for it, attaches it 

 anew to her person, and carries it off in triumph ! Or, if you 

 still withhold it, marvelous are those rapid movements of inquie- 

 tude which exhibit her distress ! she hovers about the spot, from 

 which she is unable to tear herself} and when at last you surren- 

 der back her treasures, after thus trifling with her feelings, she 

 makes the best of her legs and carries it to a place of security ! The 

 family, however, turns out not to be worth all this prodigality of 

 affection ; while living upon their mother's exertions, they are 

 orderly enough, but in a few days, when she bids them go about 

 their business jand try to find food for themselves, they attack 

 each other without mercy, and seem only to long for an oppor- 

 tunity of committing both fratricide and cannibalism, if the acci- 

 dents of life should make it necessary ! 



Dumeril, and, if I mistake not, White, in his natural history of 

 Selborne, records that he more than once remarked a cloud ol 

 floating silk in the air, on examining carefully into the threads of 

 which, he had invariably found a small spider attached to one end, 

 while the other extremity was free. These spiders, it seems, which 

 are unprovided with wings, but destined, nevertheless, to move oc- 

 casionally in that element for which wings are usually given, are 

 enabled, being already very small and light, to make themselves 

 buoyant by spinning this flocculent material, of which, of course 

 they intuitively know the quantity and the strength. They have 

 only to keep open their silk bags, and the slightest current of air 

 suffices to unravel the material which is an animal juice suddenly 

 consolidated. The loom labours, indeed, of all spiders have attracted 

 curiosity from the earliest times : the beautiful parallelism of the 

 threads, "Sure as De Moivre's, without rule or line," deserved the 

 couplet in which Pope has recorded it. 



ICHNEUMON. 



All the large tribe of flies which we call Ichneumon, have the 

 instinctive propensity to plant their eggs in, or upon the body of 

 some other insect, whose unfortunate carcase perishes in conse- 

 quence; and if insects be susceptible of pain, it must be most pain- 



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