SO SILKWORMS. 



of commerce, and the other mulberry feeding species reared in 

 India and elsewhere, belong to this family. Notwithstanding 

 their insignificance as perfect insects, however, and the absence 

 of any brilliant adornment of colour or grotesqueness of shape in 

 their larval form, they produce better silk than their more 

 splendid and remarkable relatives. The Saturnidae, on the other 

 hand, are an exceedingly numerous family, containing some four 

 hundred species already described, and they are noteworthy as 

 being some of the largest and most magnificent of all moths, and 

 as possessing brilliantly coloured caterpillars, which are often of 

 remarkably strange shapes. We shall, in this chapter, be mainly 

 concerned with the Saturnidae, which are commonly known as 

 Emperor Moths. The Bombycidae, however, demand a few 

 words first. 



Besides the mulberry-feeding species distinct from B. mori, 

 which are domesticated in India and elsewhere, there are also 

 some truly wild species of the same family, which likewise feed on 

 different kinds of mulberry and fig trees, and yield silk which is of 

 some value. Perhaps the most important of these is B. Huttoni, 

 the wild silkworm of the N. W. Himalayas. Its caterpillar, 

 in colouring and shape, is something like that of the common 

 silkworm, even to the hump behind the head, but it is covered 

 with long spines. It is of a pale cream colour mottled with 

 darker tints. It spins a pale yellow cocoon, which it surrounds 

 with the leaves of its food-plant, the wild mulberry of the 

 Himalayan forests, amongst which it occurs abundantly. It is 

 double brooded, and can only be reared on the trees, being of far 

 too restless a disposition to remain contentedly in trays filled with 

 leaves, such as would delight the heart of its civilized, but 

 captive and enervated cousin. 



Captain Hutton, after whom this species is named, remarks on 

 the instinctive power it seems to possess of detecting the approach 

 of a hailstorm. For rain it does not care, but hail, of course, is 

 quite another thing, and the merciless pelting of the icy morsels 

 would be an extremely uncomfortable, not to say damaging 

 experience, for such soft-.bodied creatures. They do not wait for 

 the actual commencement of the fusillade, but as the Captain says 

 of them : " No sooner are peals of thunder heard, than the whole 

 brood seems to regard them as a warning trumpet call, and all are 

 instantly in motion, seeking shelter beneath the thicker branches, 

 and even descending the trunk of the tree to some little distance, 

 but never proceeding so low down as to lose the protecting shelter 

 of the boughs." 



Besides this insect, there are some seven or eight other wild 



