Page:The history of silk, cotton, linen, wool, and other fibrous substances 2.djvu/179

 to the top of the stick, immediately pulled at it with one of its feet, and finding it sufficiently tense, crept along it, strengthening it as it proceeded by another thread, and thus reached the pencil."

1. "We have repeatedly witnessed this occurrence," says Mr. Rennie, "in the fields, and when spiders were placed for experiment, as Kirby has described; but we very much doubt that the thread broken is ever intended as a bridge cable, or that it would have been so used in that instance, had it not been artificially fixed and again accidentally found by the spider. According to our observations, a spider never for an instant, abandons, the thread which she dispatches in quest of an attachment, but uniformly keeps trying it with her feet, in order to ascertain its success. We are, therefore, persuaded, that when a thread is broken in the manner above described, it is because it has been spun too weak, and spiders may often be seen breaking such threads in the process of netting their webs."

The plan, besides, as explained by these distinguished writers, would more frequently prove abortive than successful, from the cut thread not being sufficiently long. They admit, indeed, that spiders' lines are often found "a yard or two long, fastened to twigs of grass not a foot in height Here, therefore, some other process must have been used ."

2. The celebrated English naturalist, Dr. Lister, whose treatise upon the native spiders of that country, has been the basis of every subsequent work on the subject, maintains that "some spiders shoot out their threads in the same manner that porcupines do their quills ; that whereas the quills of the latter are entirely separated from their bodies, when thus shot out, the threads of the former remain fixed to their anus, as the sun's rays to its body ." A French periodical writer goes a little farther, and says, 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 ob-*