Chapter VII 



R. 



-UNNiNG back for nearly two hundred years, every once in 

 a while some one has been filled with the idea that silk culture 

 would prosper in the United States. I seem to remember that 

 colonists in South Carolina began it. Down to the present time 

 it has never amounted to anything. The so-called Morus multi- 

 caulis craze in the 1830's resulted in the planting of thousands 

 of mulberry trees and in the starting of exaggerated ideas on 

 the part of many people, especially, perhaps, in the state of 

 Connecticut, with the result that many small fortunes were lost. 

 When I came to Washington in November, 1878, Professor 

 Riley had a good stock of silkworm eggs of a race that he had 

 been trying to develop in Missouri and that fed upon the leaves 

 of the Osage orange {Maclura aurantiaca) . The following spring 

 these eggs hatched, and I saw the domestic silkworm for the 

 first time. Riley had written an article about silkworms in one 

 of his latest Missouri reports, and following the directions in 

 this article I fed the worms to full growth, when they spun 

 their cocoons from which later the moths issued and laid a new 

 lot of eggs. Some of the high officials in the Department of 

 Agriculture were interested, and we did the same thing again 

 the following year. 



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