50 



clouds rise or fall or distil their rains agreeable to elec- 

 tric changes, so does the gossamer spider effect its 

 ascent, or descend to the earth. It seems super- 

 fluous and unnecessary to pursue Mr. Blackwall's view 

 of the matter at greater length ; and the multiplied 

 experiments of future observers must close the evi- 

 dence and settle the question. This hypothesis sup- 

 poses that the ascending current takes place in the 

 former part of the day, and the descending current 

 towards the afternoon ; but it cannot surely have escaped 

 observation, that the spider will ascend as readily and 

 as rapidly towards the afternoon of the day as in the 

 morning, and showers of cobwebs fall early in the 

 day as well as towards its close : thus Mr. White tells 

 us that " about nine, an appearance very unusual began 

 to demand our attention a shower of cobwebs falling 

 from very elevated regions, and continuing without 

 any interruption till the close of the day." 



In a paper " On the Ascent of the Gossamer Spider," 

 published in the Transactions of the Wernerian So- 

 ciety, we endeavoured to sustain, that its buoyancy 

 and ascent were ascribable to an electrical principle, 

 described in the preceding chapter, an opinion, if we 

 mistake not, peculiar to us. Mr. Rennie indeed says 

 that the electricity of the thread " was started " by 

 D'Isjonval ; but so far from this being the case, 

 nothing of the kind, either directly or indirectly, has 

 been advanced by him : all that he tells us is, his 

 conviction that the spiders were excited or affected by 

 aerial electricity, though an anonymous writer in the 

 Annals of Philosophy talks about a stream of air or 

 some subtile principle accompanying the emission of 

 the thread. We are afraid of carrying analogy too 

 far in the illustration of this interesting phenomenon, 

 and are inclined to make the question as little compli- 



