464 MOTIONS OF INSECTS. 



I dare say you are anxious to be told how any animals can fly without 

 wings, and wish me to begin with them. As an observer of nature, you 

 have often, without doubt, been astonished by that sight occasionally 

 noticed in fine days in the autumn, of webs commonly called gossamer 

 webs covering the earth and floating in the air; and have frequently 

 asked yourself What are these gossamer webs? Your question has from 

 old times much excited the attention of learned naturalists. It was an 

 old and strange notion that these webs were composed of dew burned by 

 the sun. 



" The fine nets which oft we woven see 



Of scorched dew," 



says Spenser. Another, fellow to it, and equally absurd, was that adopted 

 by a learned man and good natural philosopher, and one of the first Fellows 

 of the Royal Society, Robert Hooke, the author of Miwographia. " Much 

 resembling a cobweb," says he, " or a confused lock of these cylinders, is 

 a certain white substance which, after a fog, may be observed to fly up 

 and down the air : catching several of these, and examining them with my 

 microscope, I found them to be much of the same form, looking most like 

 to a flake of worsted prepared to be spun ; though by what means they 

 should be generated or produced is not easily imagined : they were of the 

 same weight, or very little heavier than the air; and 'tis not unlikely but 

 that those great white clouds, that appear all the summer time, may be of the 

 same substance" J So liable are even the wisest men to error, when, leav- 

 ing fact and experiment, they follow the guidance of fancy. Some French 

 naturalists have supposed that these fils de la Vierge, as they are called, 

 are composed of the cottony matter in which the eggs of the Coccus of 

 the vine (C. Vitis) are enveloped. 2 In a country abounding in vineyards 

 this supposition would not be absurd ; but in one like Britain, in which 

 the vine is confined to the fruit-garden, and the Coccus seldom seen out 

 of the conservatory, it will not at all account for the phenomenon. What 

 will you say, if I tell you that these webs (at least many of them) are air- 

 balloons, and that the aeronauts are not 



" Lovers who may bestride the gossamer 

 That idles in the wanton summer air, 

 And yet not fall," 



but spiders, who, long before Montgolfier, nay, ever since the creation, have 

 been in the habit of sailing through the fields of ether in these air-light 

 chariots ! This seems to have been suspected long ago by Henry Moore, 

 who says, 



" As light and thin as cobwebs that do fly 



In the blew air, caus'd by the autumnal sun, 

 That boils the dew that on the earth doth lie, 



May seem this whitish rag then is the scum ; 

 Unless that wiser men make't the field- spider's loom : " 3 



1 Microgr. 202. It has been objected to an excellent primitive writer (Clemens 

 Romanus), that he believed the absurd fable of the phoenix. But surely this may 

 be allowed for in him, who was no naturalist, when a scientific natural philosopher 

 could believe that the clouds are made of spiders' web ! 



* Latreille, Hist. Nat. xii. 388. * Quoted in the Athenaum, v. 126. 



