[149] Lister, Hist. Animalia Angliæ, 4to. p. 7. [150] Phil. Mag. ii. p. 275. [151] Vol. i. Intr. p. 417. [152] Ibid. ii. p. 339. 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 take them into your hand. Last summer, one alighted on my book as I was reading in the parlor; ran 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[153].” [153] Nat. Hist. of Selborne, vol. i. p. 327. “Having so often witnessed,” says Mr. Rennie, “the thread set afloat in the air by spiders, we can readily conceive the way in which those eminent naturalists were led to suppose it to be ejected by some animal force acting like a syringe; but as the statement can be completely disproved by experiment, we shall only at present ask, in the words of Swammerdam--‘how can it be possible that a thread so fine and slender should be shot out with force enough to divide and pass through the air?--is it not rather probable that the air would stop its progress, and so entangle it and fit it to perplex the spider’s operations[154]?’” The opinion, indeed, is equally improbable with another suggested by Dr. Lister, that the spider can retract her thread within the abdomen, after it has been emitted[155]. De Geer[156] very justly joins Swammerdam in rejecting both of these fancies, which, in our own earlier observations upon spiders, certainly struck us as plausible and true. There can be no doubt, indeed, that the animal has a voluntary power of permitting the material to escape, or stopping it at pleasure, but this is not projectile. [154] Book of Nature, part i. p. 25. [155] Hist. Anim. Anglæ, 4to. [156] Mémoires, vol. vii. p. 189.