THE STORY OF AN ENTOMOLOGIST 



manual of instruction, raised excellent cocoons and sent them 

 to Washington in bulk. We paid them the current European 

 price, and then we reeled the cocoons. 



We soon found that our correspondents would not continue 

 to raise cocoons at the rates we were paying, and we also found 

 that when we sold the reeled silk we did not receive enough even 

 to warrant the prices we had paid for the cocoons. So the experi- 

 ment was abandoned. 



Therefore, for many years, I took it that we had fairly well 

 proved that we can not produce in the United States reeled silk 

 that in price will compete with the silk received from Japan 

 and China, where labor is so cheap. 



At the San Francisco World's Fair in 1915, a new type of 

 silk reel was exhibited. A very clever chemist, Guy Wilkinson, 

 who had made a large sum of money through some invention, 

 became interested once more in the possibilities of silk culture in 

 America. He bought a place in Northern California that he 

 named Serriterre — not far from Chico. He found a Swiss Italian 

 who had new ideas about planting mulberry as a hedge sur- 

 rounding arable fields, thus occupying little land space. He also 

 got the Weber-Vitali reel from San Francisco and engaged the 

 expert Italian reeler who had been sent over to the Exposition 

 with it. He raised very excellent cocoons, and his experiment was 

 rather a promising one. But eventually it failed, and I think 

 he died. 



There have been other attempts since on a larger or smaller 

 scale, but all have failed except one. That one is now being 

 carried on with large capital and on new principles at Ensenada, 

 some miles northeast of San Diego, California. Its promoters 

 have studied carefully and scientifically every aspect of the in- 

 dustry in Southern Europe, and they have combined practically 

 all of the features of the silk industry into one institution. In 



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