As to the limits of the tenuity of the threads of gossamer there are no direct observations. Probably they are often as fine as the 1/16,000th or 1/20,000th of an inch in diameter. The condensation of a very minute quantity of moisture on gossamer threads and spiders’ webs no doubt helps to make them more readily visible to us in October weather than they are in full summer, when such moisture would not condense except in early morning or at sunset. It seems strange that man should have been unable to produce a thread so fine as that of the spider, but this reproach has now been removed. Spun glass is easily obtained 1/1000th of a inch in diameter; but Mr. C. V. Boys, F.R.S., has, by fusing quartz (rock-crystal) by the oxy-hydrogen flame, and drawing it out by means of a small arrow (a straw), discharged from a bow—the near end of the arrow being adherent to a fused droplet of quartz which is held fast—produced threads of great strength and of extraordinary tenuity. The fineness can be regulated by the rapidity with which the drawing is effected. The threads are prepared (for use in suspending swinging bars in delicate measurements of force) of a thickness of 1/10,000th of an inch. Some have been made so fine as to be not only invisible to the naked eye, but to be only vaguely indicated by the highest powers of the microscope. They are estimated to be only one-millionth of an inch in diameter. It is difficult to form any mental picture or conception of these finest quartz threads spun by Mr. Boys. But the following fact helps us to realise how delicate they are. A grain of sand just visible to the eye—that is to say, 1/100th an inch long, the same in breadth, and the same in height—would make twenty miles of such thread. XXXII THE JUMPING BEAN One way of thinking of the six hundred thousand kinds or species of insects—those tiny, ubiquitous fellow-creatures of ours which inhabit nearly every corner and cranny of the earth’s surface—is to associate them with the plants upon which, either for food or protection, the greater number of them are dependent. This makes them appear less overwhelming in their astonishing and, at first sight, meaningless variety, than when one calls them to mind pinned out in long lines in innumerable drawers and cases, or assorted, like with like, in the wonderfully accurate and interminable pictures of them produced by those patient benefactors of mankind the systematic entomologists. Every plant of any size has a number of insects associated with it, living more or less completely on its substance, or making its home in some part of the plant. Some trees are known to have more than a hundred and fifty kinds or species of insects thus dependent on them, those which are vegetarian serving in their turn as food to a variety of carnivorous insects.