140 AUTUMN AND WINTER 



on the whins ; but it is one of the smaller and less visible 

 species which produce the strangest of autumn phenomena. 

 Until you look into it, the cloud of gossamer, sometimes 

 completely covering one of 'the happy autumn fields/ sug- 

 gests the impossibility that something has been made out 

 of nothing. The gossamer will settle down like manna, 

 altering the whole complexion of the surface. The strands 

 flow close along the ground down the wind in long-drawn 

 streaks not unlike the surface of the sea where it is stretched 

 thin along the wedge of a steamer's bows. You may see 

 them float downward, a gift from nowhere, out of the misty 

 air. Every countryman in every village in England has 

 seen this gossamer visitation again and again ; yet not one 

 in a hundred has the vaguest idea of its cause, except that 

 the gossamer threads bear some resemblance to the stuff of 

 a spider web. The cause is a little difficult to realise even 

 when you investigate it. That these almost microscropic 

 creatures should all together spin each his parachute or kite 

 tail, should early launch himself forth into the air, should 

 each deliberately migrate to unknown regions in search of 

 food all this and more has an unexpectedness, an unlikeli- 

 hood which keeps alive the astonishment, even when you 

 have anatomised the animal, and learnt all the parts of the 

 living factory. When one considers the migration of birds, 

 and offish, the migratory movements of lemmings, of rats and 

 of shrew-mice, the dispersal of seed, the up and down patrol 

 of the sap, such sudden common movements as these young 

 spiders make, one begins to regard autumnal migration or 

 its equivalent as an attribute hardly less integral to the 

 common plan or design in nature than some of those more 

 familiar structural and functional similarities which bridge 

 the extremest differences between the vegetable and the 

 animal kingdom. 



