208 POPULAR WEATHER PROGNOSTICS. 



coming once a-year, accompanied by a couple of their 

 young. Perched on the kitchen chimney-top, the cry 

 of "The gulls are come!" sent all the boys of the family 

 to the favourite amusement of feeding the gulls. Each 

 armed with a bicker of brose, we pelted the gulls with 

 balls of the solid stuff till we thought they should have 

 burst. Not one of them was ever missed, and the 

 amazing rapidity with which they disappeared down 

 the capacious maw, satisfied us that gullibility, how- 

 ever characteristic of human beings, is specially de- 

 scriptive of the sea-maw's power of swallowing. 



Insects also figure as weather indicators. Incident- 

 ally we have already touched upon the sensitiveness of 

 the leech to atmospheric changes. Ants are so sensi- 

 ble of cold that the finest day will not tempt them to 

 place their eggs, or pupae, at the top of the nest should 

 the air be chill ; and it was remarked so long ago as the 

 time of Pliny, that, before bad weather, they are in a 

 bustle to secure their eggs ; " forewarned, no doubt, by 

 the perception of an altered temperature," thinks Pro- 

 fessor Kennie, who, in his charming ' Insect Miscel- 

 lanies/ ascribes the sensitiveness of ants, bees, and 

 other insects, to the same sort of feelings which in 

 human beings give warning of bad weather in the form 

 of gouty and rheumatic pains. 



As might be expected in creatures so amazingly 

 gifted with instinct, bees are living barometers. When 

 they fly to the hive and none leave it, rain is believed 

 to be near and with good reason, we think ; for Huber 

 records that, while collecting honey in the fields, the 

 working bees are so feverishly afraid of bad weather 

 that a single cloud obscuring the sun sends them home- 

 wards. 



Spiders are reputed to be so weather-wise that a 



foreign naturalist* asserts that, when it is wet and 



windy, they spin only very short lines ; but when a 



spider spins a long thread, there is a certainty of fine 



* D'lsjonval. 



