2. Our celebrated English naturalist, Dr. Lister, whose treatise upon our native spiders 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;[EN] 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."[EO] 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 object by some sense of which we are ignorant.[EP] Kirby also says, that he once observed a small garden spider (_Aranea reticulata_) "standing midway on a long perpendicular fixed thread, and an appearance caught" his "eye, of what seemed to be the emission of threads." "I, therefore," he adds, "moved my arm in the direction in which they apparently proceeded, and, as I had suspected, a floating thread attached itself to my coat, along which the spider crept. As this was connected with the spinners of the spider, it could not have been formed" by breaking a "secondary thread."[EQ] Again, in speaking of the gossamer-spider, he says, "it first extends its thigh, shank, and foot, into a right line, and then, elevating its abdomen till it becomes vertical, _shoots its thread_ into the air, and flies off from its station."[ER] Another distinguished naturalist, Mr. White of Selborne, in speaking of the gossamer-spider, says, "Every day in fine weather in autumn do I see these spiders shooting out their webs, and mounting aloft: they will go off from the finger, if you will take them into your hand. Last summer, one alighted on my book as I was reading in the parlour; and running to the top of the page, and _shooting out a web_, took its departure from thence. But what I most wondered at was, that it went off with considerable velocity in a place where no air was stirring; and I am sure I did not assist it with my breath."[ES]