258 THE BIOLOGY OF THE SEASONS 



White wrote in 1775 : " The remark that I shall make on 

 these cobweb-like appearances, called gossamer, is that, 

 strange and superstitious as the notions about them were 

 formerly, nobody in those days doubts but that they are 

 the real production of small spiders, which swarm in the 

 fields in fine weather in Autumn, and have a power of 

 shooting out webs from their tails, so as to render them- 

 selves buoyant and lighter than air." 



Inquiring into the problem why what rises should again 

 sink, he says : " If I might be allowed to hazard a sup- 

 position, I should imagine that those filmy threads, when 

 first shot, might be entangled in the rising dew, and so 

 drawn up, spiders and all, by a brisk evaporation into 

 the regions where clouds are formed ; and if the spiders 

 have a power of coiling and thickening their webs in the 

 air, as Dr. Lister says they have, then, when they were 

 become heavier than the air, they must fall." 



Very interesting, in its mixture of keen observation 

 with a slight laxity of analysis, is the concluding paragraph 

 of the twenty-third letter. One quotes it, quite naturally, 

 as if it were a sacred book. It is certainly one of the 

 Pentateuch of " Nature-Study." 



" Every day in fine weather, in Autumn chiefly, do I see 

 those spiders shooting out their webs and mounting aloft : 

 they will go off from your finger if you will take them into 

 your hand. Last Summer one alighted on my book 

 as I was reading in the parlour ; and, running to the top 

 of the page, and shooting out a web, took its departure 

 from thence. But what I most wondered at was, that it 

 went off with considerable velocity in a place where no air 

 was stirring ; and I am sure that I did not assist it with 

 my breath : so that these little crawlers seem to have, 

 while mounting, some locomotive power without the use 

 of wings, and to move in the air faster than the air itself," 



