weighed four pounds! No wonder it was sent to
the Imperial Museum at Vienna!

From his own observations on the spider
which he calls Aranea aëronautica, Mr. Murray
suggests that it may be used as a barometer.
If the weather be likely to become rainy, windy,
or the like, the spider fixes the terminating
threads by which the entire web is suspended,
unusually short, and in this state awaits the
impending change. On the other hand, if these
threads be long the weather will be proportionally
severe for a week or more. If the
spiders be completely inactive, rain will likely
follow, but if during the prevalence of rain their
wonted activity be resumed, this rain may
be considered as of short duration, and to be
quickly followed by fair and constant weather.
Spiders make alterations in their webs every
twenty- four hours, and if these changes be
observed between six and seven o'clock in
the evening they indicate a clear and pleasant
night.

Swammerdam and De Geer ridiculed the
notion of spiders flying; but Dr. Martin Lister
called a species of spider which he discovered
and described, on account of its powers of flight,
"the bird." For our part, we believe that when
scientific men understand thoroughly the aërial
locomotion of spiders, mechanical men will not
be far from solving the problem of aërostation.
Man is a wingless biped, who is trying to travel
through the air, and he may get useful hints
from a knowledge of how the wingless octopods
do it. Dr. Hulse appears to have been the first
who observed that spiders could dart their
threads into the air. Dr. Martin Lister on
several occasions saw his bird-spider pulling in
its long thread with its fore-feet, forming thus a
ball or air-balloon of flake. One day, when the
air was full of these spider-balloons, he found
them still above him, although he had mounted
to the top of the highest steeple of York Minster.
They can squirt out their threads with remarkable
force. These faculties are common to
several species of spiders. Of one species he
says it is an excellent rope-dancer, wonderfully
delighted with darting its threads, ascending
and descending and sailing in the air, balancing
itself by closing its legs together, and promoting
and directing its course as if nature had furnished
it with wings or oars.

John Hunter denies that spiders have air-cells,
or anything resembling the air-sacks by which
fishes regulate their specific gravity; and he
would be a narrow-minded physiologist who
should forget that Nature uses a great variety
of instruments to work her ends. But the fact
is they do it; and the puzzle is how they do it?
Messrs. Kirby and Spence use the word
"chariot," and ask what occasions the spiders
to mount their chariots and seek the clouds?
But the word is used without warrant, for no
one professes ever to have seen anything like a
spider-chariot. There are swimmers who send
up kites, and then float considerable distances,
drawn by the breeze upon the surface of the
summer sea. May not certain spiders have a
similar contrivance? Certain tiny black and
grey spiders, which in June last alighted on our
coat-sleeve and escaped from our fingers, first
let themselves fall some six or eight inches suspended
by a thread, and then rose till the line
was on a level with the finger, when they
loosened the thread from the finger and floated
away horizontally upon the breeze: as if a man
who could not swim were to uncoil a string or
chain of bladders, and then unhooking it from
its holdfast, were to float away upon the swiftly-flowing
tide. But different species have different
ways. We have seen cobwebs round like
balloons, or funnel-shaped like parachutes, descending
from the skies and falling upon the
stubble-fields. On examining these collapsed
balloons or parachutes, we have found a small
red spider within.

The range of our vision up into the blue is
very limited, and we know very little as yet in
reference to what is going on there. On the
19th of July, 1822, the anniversary of the royal
coronation, the yeomanry were drawn up in the
market-place at Kidderminster and fired a
salute, which brought down a shower of very
many aërial spiders. The explosions of gunpowder
had made the currents of air on which
the spiders floated, too light to bear their
weight.

Mr. John Murray says he put an air-spider
into water at the temperature of ninety-four
degrees Fahrenheit, and after remaining at the
bottom, sometimes at rest and sometimes active,
it projected a thread upward and wound itself,
sailor-like, resting occasionally, to the surface.
One of these spiders by candlelight darted
instantaneously a thread to the ceiling of a room
eight feet high, at an angle of about eighty degrees
with the horizon. "During my stay at Chester,
while I was experimenting with an aëronautic
spider," says Mr. Murray, in another place,
"during a warm day and brilliant sunshine about
noon; my room door was ajar, and the insect in
the act of propelling its threads in all directions,
suddenly darted one towards the door, in the
direction of the influx-current, perfectly horizontal,
and in length ten feet. The angle of
vision being particularly favourable I observed
an extraordinary aura or atmosphere round the
thread which I cannot doubt was electric."
"The point of a gold wire was brought near to
the vertical thread in one experiment above the
spider in the act of escaping to the ceiling of
the room. It evidently disconcerted its progress,
and the animal seemed agitated and unable
to ascend. On removing the point the
insect soon made its escape." On the 4th of
August, 1822, at three P.M., thermometer sixty-six
degrees, the ascent was slow and beautiful,
the little aëronaut rising regularly in the vertical
plane. It vanished at a height of at least thirty
feet. The friction sustained in its sudden propulsion
through the air, would alone invest the
thread with electricity; for a fibre of very fine
spun glass suddenly drawn upward, has been
seen to remain vertical and found to be electrical.
Mr. John Murray mentions Mr. T.