Let us suppose that a child can lift a six-pound weight one foot high and do this twenty times a minute. Furnish him with 350 rubber bands, each capable of pulling six pounds through one foot when stretched. Let these bands be attached to a wooden platform on which stand a pair of horses weighing 2,100 lbs., or rather more than a ton. If now the child will go to work and stretch these rubber bands, singly, hooking each one up, as it is stretched, in less than twenty minutes he will have raised the pair of horses one foot!
We thus see that the elasticity of the rubber bands enables the child to divide the weight of the horses into 350 pieces of six pounds each, and at the rate of a little less than one every three seconds, he lifts all these separate pieces one foot, so that the child easily lifts this enormous weight.
Each spider's thread acts like one of the elastic rubber bands. Let us suppose that the mouse or the snake weighed half an ounce and that each thread is capable of supporting a grain and a half. The spider would have to connect the mouse with the point from which it was to be suspended with 150 threads, and if the little quadruped was once swung off his feet, he would be powerless. By pulling successively on each thread and shortening it a little, the mouse or snake might be raised to any height within the capacity of the building or structure in which the work was done. So that to those who have ridiculed the story we may justly say: "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy."
What object the spider could have had in this work I am unable to see. It may have been a dread of the harm which the mouse or snake might work, or it may have been the hope that the decaying carcass would attract flies which would furnish food for the engineer. I can vouch for the truth of the snake story, however, and the object of this article is to explain and render credible a very extraordinary feat of insect engineering.
HOW THE SHADOW MAY BE MADE TO MOVE BACKWARD ON THE SUN-DIAL
n the twentieth chapter of II Kings, at the eleventh verse we read, that "Isaiah the prophet cried unto the Lord, and he brought the shadow ten degrees backward, by which it had gone down in the dial of Ahaz."
It is a curious fact, first pointed out by Nonez, the famous cosmographer and mathematician of the sixteenth century, but not generally known, that by tilting a sun-dial through the proper angle, the shadow at certain periods of the year can be made, for a short time, to move backwards on the dial. This was used by the French encyclopædists as a rationalistic explanation of the miracle which is related at the opening of this article.