292 OBSERVATIONS ON THE 
though perfectly inelastic, may be drawn out into 
fibres of extreme tenuity. A communication between 
the snare of this spider and its retreat is established 
by means of a funnel-shaped tube, of a slight texture, 
whose smaller extremity is in immediate connexion 
with the latter, and, indeed, sometimes constitutes 
the animal’s abode. Not unfrequently two tubes 
occur in the same snare, by one or other of which the 
spider usually effects its retreat when disturbed. 
If a newly formed flocculus be minutely examined 
under the microscope, with a pretty high magnifying- 
power, it will be found to consist of four lines and 
two delicate bands. Two of the former are straight 
and exceedingly attenuated, and upon each of them 
is disposed a tortuous line, inflected into short curves 
and loops, like a ravelled thread of fine silk. A pale 
blue band, distributed on each of the tortuous lines 
in numerous irregular curvatures, completes the floc- 
culus. ‘I'he flexures of the pale blue bands are more 
widely extended than those of the tortuous lines on 
which they occur, and to them the adherent property 
of the snare is chiefly to be ascribed. In attempting 
to determine by experiment the cause of adhesion in 
the blue bands, I ascertained that bodies with highly 
polished surfaces, such as the bulbs of thermometers 
and burnished metallic rods, if carefully applied to 
them, may be withdrawn without deranging their 
structure, though the viscid globules in the nets of 
Geometric Spiders adhere to the same bodies as soon 
