eation. "Fecit
So-and-so," she seems to say, when giving the last throw of the shuttle
to her handiwork.

That the Spider feels satisfied when, after passing and repassing from
spoke to spoke, she finishes her spiral, is beyond a doubt: the work
achieved ensures her food for a few days to come. But, in this
particular case, the vanity of the spinstress has naught to say to the
matter: the strong silk zigzag is added to impart greater firmness to
the web.

THE LIME-SNARE.

The spiral network of the Epeirae possesses contrivances of fearsome
cunning. The thread that forms it is seen with the naked eye to differ
from that of the framework and the spokes. It glitters in the sun,
looks as though it were knotted and gives the impression of a chaplet
of atoms. To examine it through the lens on the web itself is scarcely
feasible, because of the shaking of the fabric, which trembles at the
least breath. By passing a sheet of glass under the web and lifting it,
I take away a few pieces of thread to study, pieces that remain fixed
to the glass in parallel lines. Lens and microscope can now play their
part.

The sight is perfectly astounding. Those threads, on the borderland
between the visible and the invisible, are very closely twisted twine,
similar to the gold cord of our officers' sword-knots. Moreover, they
are hollow. The infinitely slender is a tube, a channel full of a
viscous moisture resembling a strong solution of gum arabic. I can see
a diaphanous trail of this moisture trickling through the broken ends.
Under the pressure of the thin glass slide that covers them on the
stage of the microscope, the twists lengthen out, become crinkled
ribbons, traversed from end to end, through the middle, by a dark
streak, which is the empty container.

The fluid contents must ooze slowly through the side of those tubular
threads, rolled into twisted strings, and thus render the network
sticky. It is sticky, in fact, and in such a way as to provoke
surprise. I bring a fine straw flat down upon three or four rungs of a
sector. However gentle the contact, adhesion is at once established.
When I lift the straw, the threads come with it and stretch to twice or
three times their length, like a thread of india-rubber. At last, when
over-taut, they loosen without breaking and resume their original form.
They lengthen by unrolling their twist, they shorten by rolling it
again; lastly, they become adhesive by taking the glaze of the gu