ECOLOGICAL 55 



for hibernating works well. In many lower animals the solution is 

 suspended animation or lethargy, and there are many other ways of 

 meeting the winter — by storing, by blanching, by putting on more 

 fat and fur, and so forth. There is much sifting, no doubt, but 

 winter must be thought of in the main as a resting-time in prepara- 

 tion for another spring. 



IN ILLUSTRATION OF SEASONAL ECOLOGY: SHOWERS 

 OF GOSSAMER 



On fine days in autumn, when there is a light breeze, we often 

 feel the touch of a gossamer thread across our face as we walk. 

 The sun sometimes illumines the threads as they float in the air, 

 and when they sink on to the ploughed fields or the golf-links they 

 form a vibrating veil. If we kneel down and look against the light we 

 sometimes detect a shght iridescence. These fallen threads must be 

 distinguished, of course, from the horizontal webs which some 

 kinds of spiders weave close to the ground, for the gossamer consists 

 of long filaments which are not viscid and have no arrangement at 

 all. At the ebb-tide of the year, but before all the insects have dis- 

 appeared, it rewards one to look for the ground-webs, often decor- 

 ated with dewdrops and hoar -frost crystals. Many of those made by 

 "money-spiders" are about the size of shillings or florins. They 

 recall Stevenson's description: "And every fairy cob and web, with 

 drops of dew bediamonded." 



The floating gossamer that we catch on our face or on our clothes 

 often consists of single threads, but there may be two or four. If 

 we are lucky we may intercept the little aeronaut itself, hanging 

 back downwards from a tiny hammock of silk from which threads 

 float out, often in two directions. This hammock is the spinner's 

 magic carpet on which it makes wonderful journeys, sometimes for 

 fifty miles. In Canada we caught some of these silken balloons about 

 the size of black currants, and provided with very long threads. 

 Why do they float? As Jonathan Edwards pointed out in 1716, 

 when he was twelve years old, the resistance of the air to the large 

 surface of the silk threads serves to counteract the down-pull of 

 gravity. They float like dandelion-down. 



The essentials of the gossamer story were discovered in 1716 by 

 that remarkable boy, who afterwards wrote a famous book, The 

 Freedom of the Will; but we are always seeing a Httle farther into it, 

 and in this connection it is a great pleasure to refer to Savory's 

 scholarly Biology of Spiders. Small spiders of various kinds climb 

 up on gateposts, palings, and tall herbs. In so doing they obey an 

 inborn predisposition or tropism to move, when they are young, 

 away from the ground. We may call it a "negative geotropism" if we 



