246 TRANSACTIONS OF THE 



satisfaction to myself, what was the matter. The weather I knew was 

 unusually bad; some rain showers, many windy days and cold, damp 

 nights, with uncommonly frequent thunder and lightning for the time of 

 year, were among the phenomena of the weather. The leaves, too, 

 seemed to be filled with too much acidity. 



All these things were unfavorable, but they could not be fixed upon as 

 the real cause of the trouble, for the reason that the worms being fed 

 by my neighbors, Flint, Ballou and Hayworth, were all subject to the 

 same natural influences, and yet they were all doing well, though their 

 growth was comparatively slow. I concluded, therefore, as the result 

 of my first feeding, that the trouble must be either in the eggs or in the 

 artificial heat, and I inclined to the latter as the cause. Yet I could not 

 settle upon this idea, for the reason that some Japanese worms, hatched 

 from eggs that had never been in the ice box, were fed in one of my 

 cocooneries at the same time, and treated in every respect like the 

 French, passed through all the changes successfully and made most 

 excellent cocoons in twenty-six days from the time of hatching. In this 

 state of uncertainty I determined to try again, and in this trial to deter- 

 mine, if possible, the exact cause of the loss. From the Japanese cocoons 

 just made I obtained a supply of good eggs. I put about three ounces 

 of these, three days after they had been laid, into my ice chest, deter- 

 mined to know what effect it would have on them. At three days old the 

 worms had begun to form in these Japanese eggs. At the same time I 

 allowed some of these Japanese eggs to hatch, and with more French 

 eggs, taken from the ice chest, I again filled both of my cocooneries. In 

 one I used no artificial heat, in the other I used enough to keep the tem- 

 perature about the same as before. 



The result was another failure with all the worms hatched from eggs 

 that had been in the ice chest, and another good success with those that 

 had not. Having allowed my three ounces of Japanese eggs to remain in 

 the ice box two weeks, during which time not one of them had hatched, 

 I took them out. and at the end of five or six days they hatched finely. 

 I had them carefully fed, and watched with a great deal of anxiety the 

 result, for though I had become pretty well satisfied that I had solved 

 the problem, yet I depended on this last experiment for positive proof, 

 and that proof I obtained. Instead of going through all the different 

 stages in good order and making fine cocoons, as did those allow r ed to 

 hatch in their proper time, these worms began to show that same irreg- 

 ularity in size at the age of ten days, and in from ten to fifteen days 

 the blue heads made their appearance, and although some of them went 

 through all the changes and made cocoons, a great deal the larger part 

 of them died in precisely the same manner as the French from the ice 

 chest had done. I will here state that in the experiment in which 1 

 used artificial heat in one cocoonery, and in the other none, the worms 

 in the latter building lived much longer and seemed better at the same 

 age, all the way through, than those in the former, though the} T did so 

 poorly after the fourth moulting, that I concluded that it would not pay 

 to feed any longer. I will also state that both Flint and Ballou, believ- 

 ing that my trouble Avas attributable to artificial heat, and not to the 

 eggs, each took another lot of my eggs after they had been kept in the 

 ice chest from four to six weeks, and hatched and fed them. Instead of 

 meeting with success, as before, the result in both cases was the same as 

 mine invariably had been with chilled eggs. A number of other parties 

 to whom I delivered eggs from the ice chest, met with the same bad for- 

 tune, and not one who fed worms from these eggs was successful, while 



