336 MOTIONS OF INSECTS. 
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 lhe, 
May seem this whitish rag then is the scum ; 
Unless that wiser men make’t the field-spider’s loom 
Where he also alludes to the old opinion of scorched 
dew. But the first naturalists who made this discovery 
appear to have been Dr. Hulse and Dr. Martin Lister— 
the former first observing that spiders shoot their webs 
into the air; and the latter, besides this, that they were 
carried upon them in that element’. This last gentle- 
man, in fine serene weather in September, had noticed 
these webs falling from the heavens, and in them disco- 
vered more than once a spider, which he named the dzrd. 
On another occasion, whilst he was watching the pro- 
ceedings of a common spider, the animal suddenly turn- 
ing upon its back and elevating its anus, darted forth a 
a9 
. 
long thread, and vaulting from the place on which it 
stood, was carried upwards to a considerable height. 
Numerous observations afterwards confirmed this extra- 
ordinary fact; and he further discovered, that while they 
fly in this manner, they pull in their long thread with 
their fore feet, so as to form it into a ball—or, as we 
may call it, air-balloon—of flake. The height to which 
spiders will thus ascend he affirms is prodigious. One 
day in the autumn, when the air was full of webs, he 
mounted to the top of the highest steeple of York minster, 
from whence he could discern the floating webs still very 
4 Quoted in the Atheneum, vy. 126. » Ray’s Letters, 69, 36— 
