Fine as gossamer! Town-bred folks never see it, and do not believe in its existence; they think it is a poetical figment, like “honey-dew.” That, too, is nevertheless a real thing—a honey-like juice poured out by the little plant-lice or aphides. Gossamer is a very real and a most beautiful thing. You may see it on the hill-sides in fine October weather, when the sun is bright but low enough to illuminate the delicate threads and reveal the “veil of silk and silver thin” spread over Nature’s loveliness. The innumerable threads glisten, and are so fine that they shine with iridescent colours, as do the equally delicate soap-bubbles fabricated by men and boys, and from the same cause. When the eye gets accustomed to them and traces them—rippling and glimmering over acres and acres of grass-land—one feels disconcerted, almost awestruck, by the revelation of this vast network of threads. Sometimes the gentle currents of air break them loose from the herbage, and they float at a higher level and envelop the puzzled intruder in an almost invisible entanglement of fairy lines. Sometimes they become felted together in flakes and float or rest as incredibly delicate tissue, woven by unseen mysterious agency. [Illustration: FIG. 47.—A young spider (four times the natural length) raising its body upwards, whilst the four silk threads (gossamer) spun by it float in the air, and so draw out further liquid silk from the spider. They increase in length to three or four yards, when they float upwards, carrying the spider with them. (After McCook.)] When the slopes of the new golf course at Wimbledon were covered last autumn with gossamer, my friends were asking what was its origin, some boldly asserting that it was impossible that such a vast acreage of threads could be produced, as others maintained, by tiny unseen spiders! Yet that is the true history of gossamer. Hundreds of thousands of minute spiders, young, and of a small kind, are present in grass fields in autumn, and throw out these marvellously fine threads from their little bodies (Fig. 47). Those who at first sight doubt this origin of gossamer are only in accordance with their forefathers. The French peasants call it _fil de la Vierge_; old English writers held it to be “dew evaporated.” A great discoverer and leader of science in his time, Robert Hook, who was elected with Nehemiah Grew as secretary of the Royal Society in 1677, and published a wonderful illustrated book called _Micrographia_ (see p. 173), wrote of gossamer. He was so far from recognising its true nature that he says: “It is not unlikely that those great white clouds which appear all the summer time may be of the same substance.” Yet it is now a simple and certain fact of observation that the countless threads in question are the work of minute spiders!