Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/556

540 glass are so flexible that a body is led to wonder if this is like the product of that lost art. To us it seems doubtful whether any woven glass, the product of art, can quite affect the singular lustre that belongs to these silicious threads spun from Nature's distaff. Each thread, although of pure silica, and solid, is really composed of a series of concentric tubes or cylinders, as if spun on a central thread or core. The effect, as respects the light, is not easily described. As the threads are composed of pure silica, one might suppose that they would be transparent, as a film of pure white glass of equal thickness. Such is not the fact. They are translucent, and have just an appreciable tint of the opal. It is this that imparts to Euplectella that softness of aspect which has been called "a delicate satiny lustre." To us the term opalescent seems better. We have a specimen which, in a good light, shows the play of colors that frozen crispy snow does in the moonlight.

As to the idea "well-woven," which the name contains, the fabric really seems to have its web and its woof. There are long threads that traverse the whole length; and there are others that cross and interlace, or, more correctly, interweave. And, what no loom of human invention has ever done, this lowly weaver makes the fabric as it progresses take on the most quaintly little flounces with the most delicate frilled edges imaginable; and all arranged in such charming grace and ease—not in parallel circles, like hoops on a barrel, but in tasteful, easy-flowing curves. In the configuration of the innumerable forms of structure, Nature, as she ascends in the grade of her work, almost abandons her parallels in the outlining and ornamentation of her constituted things. In the mineral province the structure of crystals shows her delight in parallel, straight lines. The curve is a rarity there. But in organic forms the curve is the rule, and the straight line is the exception. The lace-like structure of the Euplectella is so aerial a fabric, and so quaintly graceful, and, as one might say, so deftly done in the putting together, that any embroidery would seem in the comparison bungling. Enflounced in its own tiny, crispy frills, there is an air of improvised beauty. And there is a flavor of rank in the almost grotesque hint thrown out by the sometimes queer sort of relief afforded in this excess of elegance by a dash of chevron-work.

Euplectella is chiefly got from the Philippine Islands. The natives have their own notions, it seems, about this marvellous object. They will tell you that this beautiful sponge is found in pairs, and that they are the work of little crabs, who, they believe, build these houses while living inside them. It is a remarkable fact that generally in these glass cornucopias, as if they were cages, a pair of little crabs dwell together. How they ever got inside nobody knows. Can it be that they are silly enough to wall themselves up in this limbo of silica? Not they, although they do have nippers and thumbs. A