350 



FOOD OF INSECTS. 



directed. He, therefore, infers that spiders have the power 

 of shooting out threads and directing them at pleasure 

 towards a determined point, judging of the distance and 

 position of the object by some sense of which we are ignorant. 

 Something like this manoeuvre I once myself witnessed in a 

 male of the small garden spider {Epeira ? reticulata). It was 

 standing midway on a long perpendicular fixed thread, and 

 an appearance caught my eye of what seemed to be the emis- 

 sion of threads from its projected spinners. I therefore 

 moved my arm in the direction in which they apparently pro- 

 ceeded, and, as I suspected, a floating thread attached itself 

 to my coat, along which the spider crept. As this was con- 

 nected with the spinners of the spider, it could not have been 

 formed in the same way with the secondary thread of E, J^ia- 

 dema above described. 



Probably in this case, as in so many others, we bewilder 

 ourselves by attempting to make nature bend to generalities 

 to which she disdains to submit. Different spiders may lay 

 the foundations of their net in a different manner ; some on 

 the plan adopted by E. Diadema ; others, as liister long ago 

 conjectured by shooting out threads in the mode of the 

 flying species, as in the instances recorded by the anonymous 

 observer, and Mr. Knight. JSTor is it improbable that the 

 same species has the power of varying its procedures ac- 

 cording to circumstances. 



How far these suppositions are correct it is impossible to 

 determine without further experiments, which it is somewhat 

 strange should not before now have been instituted. Pliny 

 thought it nothing to the credit of the philosophers of his 

 day, that while they were disputing about the number of 

 heroes of the name of Hercules, and the site of the sepulchre 

 of Bacchus, they should not have decided whether the queen 

 bee had a sting or not ^ ; but it seems much more discredit- 

 able to the entomologists of ours, that they should yet be 

 ignorant how the geometric spiders fix their nets. One excuse 

 for them is, that these insects generally begin their operations 

 in the night, so that, though it is very easy to see them 



I Hist. Anim. Ang. p. 7. 



« Plin. Hist. Nat. h xi. c. 17. 



