Up to the point of ascension--to utter a Hibernianism--I have often thus followed my balloonist, but at this point I willingly yield the pursuit to a more competent witness, one whose recognized fame as the historian of the whole spider fraternity needs no emphasis from me. They have kept very few of their secrets from the Rev. Dr. McCook. He has followed them even in their flight, and has brought back all the tricks of their navigation. To have been able to describe as an eye-witness not only the ascension, but the subsequent alert and skilful rigging, trimming of ship, sailing, reefing, and final anchoring in port of this aeronaut with the silken jib, as Dr. McCook has done, acquiring his facts through a wild pantomime in the meadows, which for a time risked his reputation for sanity, is a triumph of patient investigation which deserves conspicuous acknowledgment. Here is what the doctor observed while his neighbors, as he ran cross-eyed over the meadow, were bewailing the loss of his reason: "The spider, as she was raised from the perch, had her head downward. She immediately and swiftly reverses her position, clambers up her floating threads, at the same time throwing out a few filaments, which are cunningly twisted into a sort of basket into which the feet can rest. Now the upper legs grasp the lower of the ray, and the spinnerets, being released therefrom, are again set to work, and with amazing rapidity spin out a second and similar ray, which floats up behind her. Thus our aeronaut's balloon is complete, and she sits in the middle of it, drifting whither the breeze may carry her. She is not wholly at the mercy of the wind, however, for if she wishes to alight, she can gather the threads into a little white ball under her jaws; as they gradually shorten, the spider, having nothing to buoy her, sinks by her own weight, and the striking upon some elevated object, or falling upon the grass, makes her feel at home." Having once alighted, the little pioneer immediately sets up house-keeping for herself, and the locality of its web in a year hence will doubtless be the scene of a similar balloon ascension, multiplied perhaps a thousandfold, from the neighborhood of a tuft of eggs somewhere concealed among the herbage--perhaps a brown, cocoonlike affair like that of the _Argiope riparia_, hung with its guy threads upon a dried fern.