COMMERCIAL VALUE OF SPIDER SILK. 87 
scientific and popular publications, he communicated many interesting ob- 
servations, and advocated with much enthusiasm the possibility of estab- 
lishing a new silk industry from the spinningwork of some of 
our American spider species. He was led into his investigations 
while serving as an army surgeon (August, 1863) in the war 
against the Southern rebellion, and with especial view to fur- 
nish suitable employment for the multitude of negro slaves who had been 
launched upon liberty by the rude force of war, and without the responsi- 
bility and occupations demanded for prosperous freedmen. While encamped 
in South Carolina his attention was arrested by the remarkable spinning 
qualities of a species of Nephila? which inhabits the Carolina sea islands 
and Florida. He invented an ingenious apparatus for reeling off silk from 
the spinnerets, and better adapted to the long cylindrical abdomen of 
Nephila than that of Abbe Termeyer, 
whose method he was quite ignorant of 
until three years later, but which he 
then studied and gave to the general 
public. 
The first specimen from which Pro- 
fessor Wilder tried to reel silk remained 
quiet under the process for an hour 
and a quarter, and until he had ob- 
tained one hundred and fifty yards of 
thread ; but its successors were less com- 
plaisant. He accordingly contrived an 
apparatus substantially like Termey er’s, Professor Wilder’s apparatus for reeling spider 
which also seryed the double purpose silk. 
of keeping the animal in an immovable ""*™% The body rst. tra. 05. The foll\cork 
position, and preventing her from cut- 
ting the extruding thread with her feet. ‘The contrivance consisted of two 
large corks, a bent hairpin, two large toilet pins, a bit of card, and a bit 
of lead. One cork served as a body rest, and the bottom was loaded with 
the lead, one half its top beveled off at an angle of 45°, and the card 
(Fig. 54, c) fixed upon the oblique surface so that its upper edge projected 
an eighth of an inch. Into the horizontal half of the cork was cut a shal- 
low groove (g), on either side of which were stuck two pins (p, p) about an 
inch apart. : 
The second cork served as a foil; it was rounded and smoothed at the 
smaller end, and a hairpin pushed obliquely through the lower corner of 
Wilder’s 
Experi- 
ments. 
Fic. 54. Fie. 55. 
1 Proceed. Amer. Assoc. Adynct. Science, 1865; Proc. Boston Soc. Nat. Hist., Oct. 1865; 
How My New Acquaintances Spin, Atlantic Monthly, August, 1866; Two Hundred Thousand 
Spiders, Harper’s Magazine, March, 1867; The Practical View of Spiders’ Silk, The Galaxy 
(an extinct magazine), July, 1869. 
*See Vol. I, page 146, and figures. 
