“I went into another room, says he, where the walls and ceilings were all hung round with cobwebs, except a narrow passage for the artist to go in and out. At my entrance he called out to me not to disturb his webs. He lamented the fatal mistake the world had been so long in, of using silk-worms, while we had such plenty of domestic insects, who infinitely excelled the former, because they understood how to weave as well as spin. And he proposed further, that, by employing spiders, the charge of dyeing silk should be wholly saved; whereof I was fully convinced, when he showed me a vast number of flies most beautifully colored, wherewith he fed his spiders, assuring us that the webs would take a tincture from them, and as he had them of all hues, he hoped to suit every body’s fancy, as soon as he could find proper food for the flies, of certain gums, oils, and other glutinous matter to give a strength and consistency to the threads.” THE INGENUITY OF SPIDERS.--Mr. Thomas Ewbank of New York, in a letter to the Editor of the Journal of the Franklin Institute, bearing date September 20th, 1842, gives us the following interesting description of the ingenuity of the Spider. “The resources of the lower animals have often excited admiration, and though no comprehensive and systematic series of observations have yet been made upon them(?), the time is, I believe, not distant when the task will be undertaken--perhaps within the next century. But whenever and by whomsoever accomplished, the mechanism of animals will then form the subject of one of the most interesting and _useful_ volumes in the archives of man. “Among insects, spiders have repeatedly been observed to modify and change their contrivances for _ensnaring their prey_. Those that live in fields and gardens often fabricate their nets or webs vertically. This sometimes occurs in locations where there is no object sufficiently near to which the lower edge or extremity of the web can properly be braced; and unless this be done, light puffs or breezes of wind are apt to blow it into an entangled mass. Instead of being spread out, like the sail of a ship, to the wind, it would become clewed over the upper line, or edge, like a sail when furled up. Now how would a human engineer act under similar circumstances? But ere the reader begins to reflect(!), he should bear in mind that it would not do to brace the web by running rigging from it to some _fixed_ or immovable object below--by no means;--for were this done, it could not yield to impulses of wind; the rigging would be snapped by the first blast, and the whole structure probably destroyed.