198 NORTH AMERICAN INSECTS. 



a pair of silk stockings, to appear in before the English 

 ambassador, enforcing his request with the cogent ap- 

 peal, ; For ye would not, sure, that your king should 

 appear as a scrub before strangers.' " 



Aristotle, in the third century B. C, and Pliny, in 

 the first century, A. D., both speak of the use of silk. 



The ancient Greeks and Romans procured their silk 

 from Persia, in which country silk-worms have been 

 raised from the remotest antiquity. And when I saw 

 the great number of wild silk-worms in Cachetia, Im- 

 eritia. Mingrelia, Georgia, Shirvan, and Dagestan, the 

 modern provinces of ancient Media, as far as to the 

 heights of the Caucasus, near Tiflis, the idea occurred 

 to me, that the fabulous story of the golden fleece of 

 the Argonauts must have had its origin, or reference 

 to that rich silk country. These beautiful provinces 

 are now in the possession of Russia, and are called 

 Transcaucasia, and they with the Crimea form the 

 richest and most productive countries of the Russian 

 empire. 



These Elysian fields induced my friend Castellas, of 

 Paris, now deceased, to settle in Tiflis, and encouraged 

 by the emperor Nicholas, in 182G, to erect large es- 

 tablishments for the cultivation of silk in Tillis, Kara- 

 back, Shirvan, Noukha and Imeretia, of which he show- 

 ed me the plans, when I was there, in 1825. In 

 these vast establishments, he employed twenty-seven 

 thousand hands, including eight hundred Italian men 



