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. Jt 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 Micrographia. “ Much 
resembling a cobweb,” says he, “or a confused lock of hers 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.?1 So liable are even the wisest men to error, when, leay- 
ing fact and experiment, they follow the guidance of fancy, Some French 
naturalists have supposed that these jils 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.?_ 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 aéronauts 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 
Tn 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 :” 5 
1 Microgr, 202. It has been objected to an excellent primitive writer (Clemens 
Romanus), that he believed the absurd fable of the phenix. 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 spider's’ web! 
2 Latreille, Hist. Nat, xii. 888, 5 Quoted in the Atheneum, vy. 126. 
