THE LADIES’ MAGAZINE OF GARDENING. 83 
The web is yet to be made below the bridge, and the necessary space 
is first circumscribed by boundary lines, which inclose as much as she 
thinks necessary for her purpose. She next has to find the central point 
of this inclosed space, an exercise of judgment which one would hardly 
expect a spider to possess; but this she does without either rule or light. 
She can readily make perpendicular lines, because she uses her body as a 
plummet; but how she can also dispose diagonal and radiating lines 
cannot be accounted for, without referring it to the wonderful power of 
mechanical instinct. 
The inclosed space may either be rectangular or angular; and the 
central point is somehow determined by several lines crossing each other 
at very irregular angles. When this point is fixed on, the spider begins 
to spin as many radiating lines from the centre to the boundary lines, as 
will form the principal part of her fabric. When the radiating lines are 
fixed, she comes to the centre, and binds them altogether in a circular 
closely-worked tissue, which afterwards serves as a platform, on, or under 
which she watches for her prey. After this platform is completed, the 
operator next proceeds to steady and connect the radiating lines together, 
by fixing a temporary line from one to the other, but at considerable 
distances apart. The spider then begins to form the outer marginal line 
of the web, by first fixing a thread at a proper distance from the centre, 
which she carries in one foot, down one diverging line till she can reach 
the next, up which she runs till opposite the place where it is first fixed, 
and drawing it tight, fixes it there, at the due distance from the centre, 
and thus she goes from line to line round the exterior, forming, when she 
arrives at the point from where she set out, a very regular polyhedrous 
circle. When the first circle is finished, she begins a second a little way 
within the first; then another within the second, a fourth within the 
third, and so on all round, till the whole web is completed with concentric 
lines. There is one peculiarity relative to the position of these webs which 
deserves notice: it is, that they are rarely perpendicular to the horizon, 
but lying at an acute angle from a vertical line. It is impossible to account 
for this instinctive prescience of the animal, for her own weight as a 
plummet is a natural governing power, which in this case she must take 
means to counteract by drawing away the lower edge of the web from 
remaining right under the topmost line from which the whole is suspended. 
By attending to her manners, however, we soon perceive why the net is 
placed obliquely ; she always keeps watch on the lower side, whence she 
can drop away in an instant from any threatened danger; the remains 
and offal of her prey also thus drop off without encumbering the web ; 
and besides, these geometric spiders always attack and fetter their prey 
