SPECIMENS OF WEAVING. 323 



made, let us learn a little of the apparatus wherewith they 

 make them. We can none of us have watched a silk-worm, 

 or other caterpillar, at its work, without perceiving that its 

 instrument of operation is seated very near its mouth, which 

 may often, indeed, have been mistaken for it. The line, how- 

 ever, issues, as wire from a wire-drawer, from a distinct tube, 

 or, more properly, two tubes united into one just before their 

 termination, and proceeding from a pair of bags bags of 

 liquid silk long and convoluted, placed on either side the 

 caterpillar, each narrowing as they meet, and finally uniting 

 in the before-mentioned instrument, termed the " spinneret/' 

 We may look now at what the weaver, by its aid, is enabled to 

 produce, and admire in this collection of cocoons the infinite 

 variety of their several textures, all adjusted accurately, in 

 solidity or lightness, to the requirements, as modified by season, 

 duration, and locality, of the chrysalides they are destined to 

 enclose. 



Here we have them from a veil of delicate net-work to a 

 covering thick and warm as cloth. 



Some (as those of the silk-worm) are of pure silk, mingled 

 in others, in various proportions, with baser materials, such as 

 hairs from the weaver's own body, particles of wood, bark, 

 or earth; while a few are distinguished by partaking largely 

 of animal secretions, widely different from silk, such as (in 

 the lacquey) a powder resembling brimstone, and (in the 

 oak-egger) a calcareous substance not dissimilar to the crust 



