FOOD OF INSECTS, 4-13 



prisoner escaped, and not a little pleased to discover, on 

 further examination, a thread extended from the top 

 of the stick to a cabinet seven or eight inches distant, 

 which thread had doubtless served as its bridge. Eager 

 to witness the process by which the line was constructed, 

 I replaced the spider in its former position. After fre- 

 quently creeping down and mounting up again as before, 

 at length it let itself drop from the top of the stick, not 

 as before by a single thread, but by two^ each distant from 

 the other about the twelfth of an inch, guided as usual 

 by one of its hind feet, and one apparently smaller than 

 the other. When it had suffered itself to descend nearly 

 to the surface of the water, it stopped short, and, by some 

 means which I could not distinctly see, broke off close 

 to the spinners the smallest thread, which still adhering 

 by the other end to the top of the stick floated in the 

 air, and was so light as to be carried about by the slight- 

 est breath. On approaching a pencil to the loose end 

 of this line, it did not adhere from mere contact. I 

 therefore twisted it once or twice round the pencil, and 

 then drew it tight. The spider, which had previously 

 climbed to the top of the stick, immediately pulled at it 

 with one of its feet, and, finding it sufficiently tense, crept 

 along it, strengthening it as it proceeded by another 

 thread, and thus reached the pencil a . 



a Some time after making this experiment I stumbled upon a pas- 

 sage in Redi (De Insectis, p. ] 19.) from which it appears that Blan- 

 canus, in his Commentaries upon Aristotle, has related a series of ob- 

 servations which led him to precisely the same result. Lehmann, 

 too, in a paper in the Transactions of the Society of Naturalists at 

 Berlin (translated in the Philosophical Magazine, xi. 323.) has given 

 an explanation somewhat similar of the operations of this very spider, 

 but I am inclined to think erroneous in some particulars. He de- 



