SILK-WORMS AND SERICULTURE. 665 



tine is elongated, and its different parts, that we found so difficult to 

 distinguish, are very much changed. If we examine in detail all the 

 organs just now indicated, even to the nervous system, we shall find 

 modifications not less striking. 



But these are not the strangest changes that have occurred. There 

 are others which still more arrest our attention ; they are those which 

 relate to the production of a new generation. 



All caterpillars are neuters that is to say, there are no males or fe- 

 males among them. They have no apparatus of reproduction. These 

 organs are developed during the period that follows the formation of 

 the chrysalis while the animal is motionless, and seemingly dead. 

 Marriages occur at the coming out from the cocoon, and, immediately 

 after, the female lays her eggs, averaging about 500 (Fig. 13). This 



Fig. 13. 



Silk -worm Moth (Female). 



done, she dies, the male ordinarily dying first. It is a general law for 

 insects ; the butterfly of the silk-worm does not escape it. It is even 

 more rigorous for him than for his brethren that we see flying from 

 flower to flower. From the moment of entering the cocoon, the silk- 

 worm takes no nourishment. When it becomes a butterfly, and has 

 assured the perpetuity of the species, its task is accomplished ; there 

 is nothing more but to die. 



Such, briefly, is the natural history of the silk-worm. It remains 

 to trace rapidly its industrial history. 



Whence came this insect ? What is its country and that of the 

 mulberry for the tree and the animal seem to have always travelled 

 side by side? Every thing seems to indicate that China Northern 

 China is its point of departure. Chinese annals establish the exist- 

 ence of industries connected with it from those remote and semi- 

 fabulous times when the emperors of the Celestial Empire had, it is 

 said, the head of a tiger, the body of a dragon, and the horns of 

 cattle. They attribute to the Emperor Fo-Hi, 3,400 years before our 

 era, the merit of employing silk in a musical instrument of his own 



