Fine as gossamer! Town-bred folks never see it, and do not believe in its existence; they think it is a poetical figment, like “honey-dew.” That, too, is nevertheless a real thing—a honey-like juice poured out by the little plant-lice or aphides. Gossamer is a very real and a most beautiful thing. You may see it on the hill-sides in fine October weather, when the sun is bright but low enough to illuminate the delicate threads and reveal the “veil of silk and silver thin” spread over Nature’s loveliness. The innumerable threads glisten, and are so fine that they shine with iridescent colours, as do the equally delicate soap-bubbles fabricated by men and boys, and from the same cause. When the eye gets accustomed to them and traces them—rippling and glimmering over acres and acres of grass-land—one feels disconcerted, almost awestruck, by the revelation of this vast network of threads. Sometimes the gentle currents of air break them loose from the herbage, and they float at a higher level and envelop the puzzled intruder in an almost invisible entanglement of fairy lines. Sometimes they become felted together in flakes and float or rest as incredibly delicate tissue, woven by unseen mysterious agency.

When the slopes of the new golf course at Wimbledon were covered last autumn with gossamer, my friends were asking what was its origin, some boldly asserting that it was impossible that such a vast acreage of threads could be produced, as others maintained, by tiny unseen spiders! Yet that is the true history of gossamer. Hundreds of thousands of minute spiders, young, and of a small kind, are present in grass fields in autumn, and throw out these marvellously fine threads from their little bodies (Fig. 47). Those who at first sight doubt this origin of gossamer are only in accordance with their forefathers. The French peasants call it fil de la Vierge; old English writers held it to be “dew evaporated.” A great discoverer and leader of science in his time, Robert Hook, who was elected with Nehemiah Grew as secretary of the Royal Society in 1677, and published a wonderful illustrated book called Micrographia (see p. 173), wrote of gossamer. He was so far from recognising its true nature that he says: “It is not unlikely that those great white clouds which appear all the summer time may be of the same substance.” Yet it is now a simple and certain fact of observation that the countless threads in question are the work of minute spiders!

The pretty name “gossamer” has puzzled the etymologists and led to some far-fetched suggestions. That favoured by the authority of the great Oxford dictionary of the English language is that it is a corruption of “Go-summer,” because gossamer appears in autumn and is associated with St. Martin’s summer. This is like saying that the word “cray-fish” refers to fish that live in a “cray” or brook, instead of deriving it from the French word Écrevisse. The Germans call gossamer Sommerweben. But the Latin word for cotton is gossypium; and there is an Italian word, gossampino, which occurs in an English form, gossampine, in the sixteenth century, and means a kind of silk or cotton obtained from the fluffy hairs of a plant called bombax. We also find “gossamer” spelt “gossamire” in English of that date; and it seems to me most likely that an Italian word gossamira, signifying “fairy-cotton” or “magic goose-down,” is the origin of our word.

There are 500 different kinds of spider carefully described as occurring in the British Islands, and about 2000 others from remoter regions. Precisely which of them forms the “gossamer” of our meadows it is difficult to say, as all have the habit of secreting a viscid fluid from one or two pairs of projecting spinning knobs or stalks, which are seen at the hinder end of the body (Figs. 48, 49, and 50). The viscid fluid is poured out by a great number of minute tubes, and hardens at once into a thread, which is wonderfully fine, yet strong. Different kinds of spiders make use of these threads for different purposes, hence their name “spinners.” Some make burrows in the ground and line them with a felt of these threads, others enclose their eggs in a case formed by winding them round the eggs, others form “snares” of the most marvellous mechanical ingenuity with them, by which insects are entangled and are then paralysed by the poisonous stab of the spider’s claws, and have their juices sucked out of them at the spider’s leisure. The snares of spiders are in some species merely irregular webs fastened and suspended by threads, in other cases they are gracefully-modelled funnels or cups, whilst a third kind, the disc-like webs made up of radiating and circularly-disposed threads fixed in a geometrical pattern, excel—in the mechanical precision of their workmanship and the masterly treatment of engineering difficulties—the constructions of any other kind of animal. It is amongst this kind of spiders that the formation by the spinning knobs of threads or lines and their use in various ways is most general and frequent. The smaller spiders expel the viscid thread, drawing it out from their bodies by their own movement away from the object to which it at first adhered. When it breaks loose from that support it is carried upwards by air-currents and drawn out from the spinners body to many yards’ length (Fig. 47). It then becomes a “flying-line,” and the spider may sail away on it or run up it and disappear. The celebrated story of the Indian juggler’s performance—traditional and even solemnly attested by witnesses, but failing to pass the test of photography—must have been suggested by this common, yet wonderful, proceeding of small spiders. The juggler, standing in an open place, surrounded by a ring of spectators, uncoils a rope, 50 feet long, from his waist, and holding one end, throws the other up into the air. The rope, without any support, remains stretched and upright. A small boy now enters the ring and climbs up the rope, draws it up after him, and disappears with it in the upper air! That is an illusion, but it is precisely what thousands of small spiders are continually doing. A big spider—the well-grown female of the common garden spider, for instance, cannot do this—her thread is not strong enough, and her weight is too great. But the male of the same species, who is much smaller, fortunately for him, can safely run on a hanging line—and thus can rapidly escape from the side of his mistress, who, after receiving his caresses, has an unpleasant habit of seizing, killing, and sucking the blood of the adventurous male, should he linger longer in her company, and fail in the agility and rapidity of his exit.

The threads of the garden spider (the Porte-croix of the French, white-cross spider, Epeira diadema, Fig. 51) are fixed by astronomers in their telescopes for the purpose of giving fine lines in the field of view, by which the relative positions of stars may be accurately measured. For a century astronomers desired to make use of such lines of the greatest possible fineness, and procured at first silver wire drawn out to the extreme limit of tenuity attainable with that metal. They also tried hairs (1/500th of an inch thick) and threads of a silk-worm’s cocoon, which are split into two component threads each only 1/2000th of an inch thick. But in 1820 an English instrument maker named Troughton introduced the spider’s line. This can be readily obtained three or four times smaller in breadth than the silk-worm’s thread, and has also advantages in its strength and freedom from twist. In order to obtain the thread, the spider is carefully fixed on a miniature “rack,” and the thread, which at the moment of issue from the body is a viscid liquid, is made to adhere to a winder, by turning which the desired length of firm but elastic thread can be procured. It has been proposed to use spiders’ silk in manufactures as a substitute for silk-worms’ silk, and pioneers have woven gloves, stockings, and other articles from it. It appears that there are species of spider in other parts of the world whose thread is coarser and more suitable for this purpose than that of any of our British spiders. But it is estimated that the expense in feeding the spiders—which require insect food—would make the thread obtained from them far too costly to compete with silk-worm silk.

A number of different kinds of the lower animals besides spiders have the power of producing threads. The caterpillars of some moths are especially noted for this, since their thread is familiar to us all as “silk.” It is secreted as a viscid fluid by a pair of tubes opening at the mouth, and hardens on escape. Even some marine creatures—the mussels—produce threads, in this case from a gland or sac in the muscular foot, by means of which they fix themselves to rocks. A very big mussel—the Pinna—called Capo lungo by the Mediterranean fishermen and Capy longy at Plymouth, where they are also found, produces a sufficient quantity of fine horny threads to be used in weaving, and gloves have been made at Genoa from the shell-fish silk.

The threads produced by the hardening of the tenacious fluid exuded by these various animals were probably simply protective in origin. The curious caterpillar-like creature Peripatus spits out a viscid fluid when it is disturbed, which hardens into threads, and hopelessly entangles any small enemy which may venture to attack it. Threads of a poisonous nature are thrown out by jelly-fishes, polyps, and sea anemones, and serve them both as defence and as means of paralysing and capturing prey. A later stage in the use of such threads is their “felting” to form a case or tube (as in the sea anemone called Cerianthus), and so their application has gradually developed to the formation of egg-cases, snares, and the wonderful web of the geometric spider, and the countless “flying-lines” of smaller spiders, which make up the mysterious thing we call “gossamer.”

As to the limits of the tenuity of the threads of gossamer there are no direct observations. Probably they are often as fine as the 1/16,000th or 1/20,000th of an inch in diameter. The condensation of a very minute quantity of moisture on gossamer threads and spiders’ webs no doubt helps to make them more readily visible to us in October weather than they are in full summer, when such moisture would not condense except in early morning or at sunset. It seems strange that man should have been unable to produce a thread so fine as that of the spider, but this reproach has now been removed. Spun glass is easily obtained 1/1000th of a inch in diameter; but Mr. C. V. Boys, F.R.S., has, by fusing quartz (rock-crystal) by the oxy-hydrogen flame, and drawing it out by means of a small arrow (a straw), discharged from a bow—the near end of the arrow being adherent to a fused droplet of quartz which is held fast—produced threads of great strength and of extraordinary tenuity. The fineness can be regulated by the rapidity with which the drawing is effected. The threads are prepared (for use in suspending swinging bars in delicate measurements of force) of a thickness of 1/10,000th of an inch. Some have been made so fine as to be not only invisible to the naked eye, but to be only vaguely indicated by the highest powers of the microscope. They are estimated to be only one-millionth of an inch in diameter. It is difficult to form any mental picture or conception of these finest quartz threads spun by Mr. Boys. But the following fact helps us to realise how delicate they are. A grain of sand just visible to the eye—that is to say, 1/100th an inch long, the same in breadth, and the same in height—would make twenty miles of such thread.