GOSSAMER.
OF earthly things, the least earthly of all are the films and threads of gossamer which float in the still days of St. Luke's Summer. Mediaeval legend saw in them the remnants of the shroud in which the Virgin Mary ascended from earth to heaven, and later fancy the material from which fairies spun their garments, or which they used to harness to the cars their winged steeds of the insect world, when " Four nimble gnats the horses were,
The harnesses of gossamere."
But, indeed, the gossamer garments often needed no spinning at all, for the gentlest currents of the air ply together the warp and woof of the invisible gossamer threads, and in the course of a still autumn day send them down to earth, soft, shining, imponderable, in ready-made sheets of white film, fit to spread on Titania's couch or to cover a fairy pillow.
The still autumn hours, of which we enjoyed many last week, are often known as " gossamer weather." They are the days of perfect rest after the fulfilment of the year, the ripening of all its fruits, the maturity of all its young broods of birds and beasts and fishes. The halcyon days of spring were calm enough to have engendered the pretty story that the kingfisher's nest could float unbroken on the waters of the Grecian seas. But far greater is the real calm and tranquillity of the clear and sunlit skies in which these almost imper- ceptible threads of insect silk and their tiny spinners can float upwards thousands of feet to the serene and cloudless levels of the autumn skies.
Gossamers are to man something such as disembodied spirits must be to dwellers in the skies, as pictured by those who wrote on the colour and shape of souls. They never saw men on earth, but only their souls in heaven. We never see gossamers in the skies, but only when lying on the earth or sinking thither, like the cast-off garments of invisible beings that had ascended and thrown away what they no longer needed in the environment of another world than ours. Even now we do not know what the makers of the gossamer are doing, or where they are, when their threads float down to earth again. They may be lying invisible in the grass at our feet, or they may be floating in the air, looking down at the misty veil that lies between them and all terrestrial life. What we see of the gossamer is so beautifully described b3 Gilbert White that if it were the only passage surviving among his writings, it would be evidence of his incomparable powers of sight and expression. It says almost the last word as to the appearance of the webs at this time of the year He wrote of the close of the third week of this month :— " On September the 21st, 1741, being then on a visit, and intent on field diversions, I rose before daybreak. When I came into the enclosures I found the stubbh,s and clover grounds matted all over with a thick coat of cobwebs, in the meshes of which a copious and heavy dew hung so plentifully that the whole face of the country seemed, as it were, covered over with two or three setting nets, drawn the one over the other. When the dogs attempted to hunt, their eyes wera so blinded and hoodwinked that they could not proceed, but were obliged to lie down and scrape the encumbrances from their face with their forefeet, so that, finding my sport interrupted, I returned home musing in my mind on the oddness of the occurrence. As the morning advanced, the sun became bright and warm, and the day turned out one of those most lovely ones which no season but the autumn produces ; cloudless, calm, serene, and worthy of the south of France itself. About nine an appearance very unusual began to attract our attention, a shower of cobwebs, falling from the very elevated regions, and continuing, without any interrup- tion, until the close of the day. These webs were not single filmy threads, floating in the air in all directions, but perfect flakes or rags ; some were an inch broad, and five or six feet long, which fell with a degree of velocity which showed that they were con- siderably heavier than the atmosphere. On every side as the observer turned his eyes might he behold a continual succession of fresh flakes falling into his sight, and twinkling like stars as they turned their sides to the sun."
White goes on to note that the shower extended over a great extent of country, as he subsequently learnt, while the "anticyclonic" nature of the weather, as we should now call it, was all in favour of such an extension of the same still air; and he then gives his own ideas as to the way in which the webs were made, transported aloft, and caused to descend. He dismisses the strange and superstitious notions formerly current about them, and says that there is no doubt that they are the real production of small spiders, which swarm in the fields in fine weather in autumn, and have a power of shooting out webs from their tails, so as to render themselves buoyant and lighter than air, "though why these apterous insects
should that day take such a wonderful aerial excursion, and why their webs should at once become so gross and material as to be considerably more weighty than air, and to descend with precipitation, is a matter beyond my skill."
There is still much to be learnt about the aeronautics of these little spinners. But Gilbert White's view as to the way in which they make to themselves wings, or floating and ascending ropes and hammocks, seems to have been right, according to what others have seen when watching the living spiders before beginning their ascent. What has been added to general knowledge is a fact which accounts for the sudden, astonishing, incalculable numbers of the creatures that simultaneously ascend into enormous tracts of air on the fine days in autumn. "Ballooning" appears to be the regular amusement, not of one or two particular spiders called " gossamer spiders," but of the innumerable young of many kinds of web-making species. Most of our young spiders are hatched in the autumn, and though they vary much in fertility, some laying only fifty, and others as many as two thousand eggs, the average is high. As soon as the young spider is out of the egg it is able to spin, and it also has an innate knowledge of how to use the thread to the best advantage. Young spiders seem aware that while very small they can use floating threads as aerial sails far better than when they have grown older and heavier, and very sensibly they use this power, as it would seem, purely as a means of enjoyment. Older spiders will spin a long thread and keep lowering them- selves from a beam or branch with the set purpose of being blown across a space they wish to cross, elongating the thread just as any one might lengthen the wire of a pendulum in order to increase the swing at the bottom. But the young spider throws out its threads and lets itself be carried away and upwards for the fun of the thing. It is certainly not in search of prey, for that would be found nearer the ground. They have been seen to stand on tiptoe, with upturned abdomen, and to go on spinning threads and allowing them to float on the wind till the sail so set carried them off on their aerial voyage, to sport in the currents and vapours of the upper regions of the sky. The formation and descent of the films, of which Gilbert White saw a very unusual example, but one which is in part to be seen on several days every autumn, is probably due to the en- tangling and drifting of innumerable separate films. These as they float ascend and descend, become first netted together, and often later are turned and twisted gently in various ways till they form a little ball of gossamer silk. Every one knows how readily air parts with its water in the condition of vapour, and deposits it upon spiders' webs in the form of drops of dew, upon the ground, and upon posts, trees, and palings. It seems natural that the webs or threads when floating in the air should also gain weight from condensing vapour, and so descend as Gilbert White saw them. The matting of the earth as the air cools towards sunset is often a wonderful sight. In the Thames Valley meadows the threads lie in such sheets that they sometimes reflect the rays of the setting sun as if from lakes of water. In these fallen threads it is difficult to find an insect entangled ; yet the finest webs of the geometrical spiders which abound at the same season are often quite encumbered with the bodies of minute gnats and flies.
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