ON THE SPIDER. 
353 
4tli, In the forms, designs, and colours one detects in the thickness of the 
living tissue; as, for example, on lifting with the scalpel the strata of the wing- 
sheath of the beetles. Nature, which has so embellished the surface, has 
hidden, perhaps, still more beauty in the depth. Nothing is finer than the 
vital fluids, when seen in the mobility of their circulation, and in the delicate 
canals where that circulation is accomplished and defined. They speak to us 
less eloquently, and impress us less forcibly by the splendour of the glittering 
leaves among which they circulate, than by the expressive forms in which we 
divine the mystery of their life. These are their visible energies. 
NOTE 11.—Book ii., Chaps, ix. and x. 
The Spider .—These two chapters are mainly the result of our own observa¬ 
tions. We have profited, however, by several authorities; especially by the 
capital and classical work, the grand labour of Walckenaer,—which is of 
importance both for the description, classification, and moral history of the 
Spiders. 
Azara tells us that in Paraguay the natives spin the cocoon of a great orange- 
coloured spider fully an inch in diameter. Sir George Staunton, the English 
ambassador to China, in his “Travels in Java” (vol. i., p. 343) informs us that 
the epeiras of Asia weave such stout webs that they can only be cut with a 
sharp-edged instrument; at the Bermudas, their webs are capable of arresting 
the progress of a bird as big as a thrush (Bichard Stafford, Coll. Acad., 
ii., p. 156). 
Doctor Lemercier, our learned bibliographer, has lent to me (from his 
personal collection) a rare and very clever brochure by Quatrefages on the 
hygrometrical sensibility of spiders, on their prescience of variations of the 
temperature—which we might very well turn to advantage—and on the skilful 
exposure of their webs. 
The formation of their beautiful and poetical autumn-webs, which are 
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