[742] I am not certain whether the garden spider does not more frequently form one or two of the principal radii of the net, before she spins the exterior lines.
[743] Treatise on the Apple and Pear, p. 97.
[744] Some time after making this experiment I stumbled upon a passage in Redi (De Insectis, p. 119.) from which it appears that Blancanus, in his Commentaries upon Aristotle, has related a series of observations which led him to precisely the same result. Lehmann, too, in a paper in the Transactions of the Society of Naturalists at Berlin (translated in the Philosophical Magazine, xi. 323.) has given an explanation somewhat similar of the operations of this very spider, but I am inclined to think erroneous in some particulars. He describes it as emitting numerous floating threads at the commencement of its descent. That he is mistaken in supposing these threads to be more than one, is proved by the fact which I have observed—that even that one sometimes breaks by the weight of the spider. How then could an insect almost as big as a gooseberry be supported by a line of the tenuity here attributed to it?
[745] An. vii. Vindemiaire. Translated in Phil. Mag. ii. 275.
[746] Hist. Anim. Ang. p. 7.
[747] Plin. Hist. Nat. l. xi. c. 17.
[748] May not the spinners mentioned by Leeuwenhoek (see above p. 404, [note]) be peculiar to the retiary spiders, and furnish this viscid thread?
[749] Brez, La Flore des Insectophiles, 129.
[750] Lister, Hist. Anim. Ang. 32, tit. 4.
[751] Phil. Tr. 1668, p. 792.