SPIDERS. 337 



If Aristotle, for example, had ever looked narrowly 

 at a spider when spinning, he could not have fancied, 

 as he does, that the materials which it uses are nothing 

 but wool stripped from its body. On looking, then, 

 with a strong magnifying glass, at the teat-shaped 

 spinnerets of a spider, we perceive them studded with 

 regular rows of minute bristle-like points, about a 

 thousand to each teat, making in all from five to six 

 thousand. These are minute tubes which we may 

 appropriately term spinnerules, as each is connected 

 with the internal reservoirs, and emits a thread of 

 inconceivable fineness. In the figure below, this 

 wonderful apparatus is represented as it appears in 

 the microscope. 



Spinneret* of a Spider magnified to thow the Spinnerules. 



We do not recollect that naturalists have ventured 

 to assign any cause for this very remarkable multi- 

 plicity of the spinnerules of spiders, so different from 

 the simple spinneret of caterpillars. To us it ap- 

 pears to be an admirable provision for their mode of 

 life. Caterpillars neither require such strong ma- 

 terials, nor that their thread should dry as quickly. 



