. Chap. 28.] 
SPIDEES. 
27 
their extreme lightness in summer : for, so greatly have man- 
ners degenerated in our day, that, so far from wearing a cuirass, 
a garment even is found to be too heavy. The produce of the 
Assyrian silk- worm, however, we have till now left to the 
women only. 
CHAP. 28. (24.) — SPIDEES ; the Kmm that make webs ; the 
MATERIALS USED BY THEM IN SO DOIJnG. 
It is by no means an absurdity to append to the silk- worm 
an account of the spider, a creature which is worthy of our 
especial admiration. There are numerous kinds of spiders, how- 
ever, which it will not be necessary here to mention, from the 
fact of their being so well known. Those that bear the name 
of pJialangium are of small size, with bodies spotted and run- 
ning to a point ; their bite is venomous, and they leap as they 
move from place to place. Another kind, again, is black, and 
the fore-legs are remarkable for their length. They have all of 
them three joints in the legs. The smaller kind of wolf-spider^^ 
does not make a web, but the larger ones make their holes in 
the earth, and spread their nets at the narrow entrance thereof. 
A third kind, again, is remarkable for the skill which it dis- 
plays in its operations. These spin a large web, and the ab- 
domen suffices to supply the material for so extensive a work, 
whether it is that, at stated periods the excrements are largely 
•secreted in the abdomen, as Democritus thinks, or that the 
creature has in itself a certain faculty of secreting a peculiar 
sort of woolly substance. How steadily does it work with its 
claws, how beautifully rounded and how equal are the threads 
as it forms its web, while it employs the weight of its body as 
an equipoise ! It begins at the middle to weave its web, and 
then extends it by adding the threads in rings around, like a 
warp upon the woof : forming the meshes at equal intervals, 
but continually enlarging them as the web increases in breadth, 
it finally unites them all by an indissoluble knot. With what 
wondrous art does it conceal the snares that lie in wait 
for its prey in its checkered nettings ! How little, too, would 
it seem that there is any such trap laid in the compactness of 
enacted "no vestis Serica viros fsedaret" — *'That men shonld not defile 
themselves by wearing garments of silk,*' Ann. B. ii. c. 33. 
The Aranea lupus of Linnaeus. ^ 
^3 As Cuvier observes, he has here guessed at the truth. 
