, neither more nor less. Far from squandering silk upon it, she
saved her silk so as to have enough for the whole web. The gap will be
better mended, little by little, afterwards, as the sheet is strengthened
all over with new layers. And this will take long. Two months later,
the window--my work--still shows through and makes a dark stain against
the dead-white of the fabric.

Neither weavers nor spinners, therefore, know how to repair their work.
Those wonderful manufacturers of silk-stuffs lack the least glimmer of
that sacred lamp, reason, which enables the stupidest of darning-women to
mend the heel of an old stocking. The office of inspector of Spiders'
webs would have its uses, even if it merely succeeded in ridding us of a
mistaken and mischievous idea.

CHAPTER XI: THE GARDEN SPIDERS: THE LIME-SNARE

The spiral network of the Epeirae possesses contrivances of fearsome
cunning. Let us give our attention by preference to that of the Banded
Epeira or that of the Silky Epeira, both of which can be observed at
early morning in all their freshness.

The thread that forms them 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