[XXXI]
GOSSAMER
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.
Fig. 47.—A young spider (four times the natural length) raising its body upwards, whilst the four silk threads (gossamer) spun by it float in the air, and so draw out further liquid silk from the spider. They increase in length to three or four yards, when they float upwards, carrying the spider with them. (After McCook.)
[Transcriber’s Note: The original image is approximately 4¾ inches (12cm) high and 1¼ inches (3.5cm) wide.]
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.