“In the yeare that L. Paulus and C. Marcellus were Consuls,” says Pliny, “it rained wool about the castle Carissa, neare to which a yeare after, T. Annius Milo was slaine.”[1174] This rain of wool was doubtless a shower of gossamer. It was an old and strange notion that the gossamer webs were composed of dew burned by the sun. Says Spenser: More subtle web Arachne cannot spin; Nor _the fine nets_, which oft we woven see, Of _scorched dew_, do not in th’ ayre more lightly flee.[1175] Thomson also: How still the breeze! save what _the filmy threads_ Of _dew evaporate_ brushes from the plain.[1176] And Quarles: And now _autumnal dews_ were seen To _cobweb_ every green.[1177] Likewise Blackmore: How part is spun in _silken threads_, and clings, Entangled in the grass, in _gluey strings_.[1178] Henry More also mentions this old belief; but suspected, however, the true origin and use of the filmy threads: As light and thin as _cobwebs_ that do fly In the blue air caused by th’ _autumnal sun_, That _boils the dew_, that on the earth doth lie; May seem this whitish rag then is the scum; Unless that wiser men mak’t the _field-spider’s loom_.[1179] Jamieson, in his Scottish Dictionary, gives _sun-dew webs_ as a name given in the South of Scotland to the gossamer. The Swedes call a cobweb _dwaergsnaet_, from _dwaerg_, a species of malevolent fairy or demon; very ingenious, and supposed often to assume the appearance of a Spider, and to form these nets. The peasants of that country say, _Jorden naetjar sig_, “the earth covers itself with a net,” when the whole surface of the ground is covered with gossamer, which, it is commonly believed, indicates the seedtime.[1180] Voss, in a note on his Luise (iii. 17), says that the popular belief in Germany is, that the gossamers are woven by the Dwarfs. Keightley thinks the word gossamer is a corruption of _gorse_, or _goss samyt_, _i.e._ the _samyt_, or finely-woven silken web that lies on the _gorse_ or furze.[1181] A learned man and good natural philosopher, and one of the first Fellows of the Royal Society, Robert Hooke, the author of _Micrographia_, gravely remarked in his scientific disquisition on the gossamer, that it “was not unlikely, but those great white clouds, that appear all the summer time, may be of the same substance!!”[1182]