mal's industry
alone. It has to wait until a breeze carries the line to the pier-head
in the bushes. Sometimes, a calm prevails; sometimes, the thread catches
at an unsuitable point. This involves great expenditure of time, with no
certainty of success. And so, when once the suspension-cable is in
being, well and solidly placed, the Epeira does not change it, except on
critical occasions. Every evening, she passes and repasses over it,
strengthening it with fresh threads.

When the Epeira cannot manage a fall of sufficient depth to give her the
double line with its loop to be fixed at a distance, she employs another
method. She lets herself down and then climbs up again, as we have
already seen; but, this time, the thread ends suddenly in a filmy hair-
pencil, a tuft, whose parts remain disjoined, just as they come from the
spinneret's rose. Then this sort of bushy fox's brush is cut short, as
though with a pair of scissors, and the whole thread, when unfurled,
doubles its length, which is now enough for the purpose. It is fastened
by the end joined to the Spider; the other floats in the air, with its
spreading tuft, which easily tangles in the bushes. Even so must the
Banded Epeira go to work when she throws her daring suspension-bridge
across a stream.

Once the cable is laid, in this way or in that, the Spider is in
possession of a base that allows her to approach or withdraw from the
leafy piers at will. From the height of the cable, the upper boundary of
the projected works, she lets herself slip to a slight depth, varying the
points of her fall. She climbs up again by the line produced by her
descent. The result of the operation is a double thread which is unwound
while the Spider walks along her big foot-bridge to the contact-branch,
where she fixes the free end of her thread more or less low down. In
this way, she obtains, to right and left, a few slanting cross-bars,
connecting the cable with the branches.

These cross-bars, in their turn, support others in ever-changing
directions. When there are enough of them, the Epeira need no longer
resort to falls in order to extract her threads; she goes from one cord
to the next, always wire-drawing with her hind-legs and placing her
produce in position as she goes. This results in a combination of
straight lines owning no order, save that they are kept in one, nearly
perpendicular plane. They mark a very irregular polygonal area, wherein
the web, it