DIRECT BENEFITS DERIVED FROM INSECTS. 223 



ness, lustre, and beauty, and without which courts would lose half their 



splendor. We must consider it, what it actually is, as the staple article 



of cultivation in many large provinces in the south of Europe, amongst 



the inhabitants of which the prospect of a deficient crop causes as great 



alarm as a scanty harvest of grain with us ; and after giving employment 



to tens of thousands in its first production and transportation, as furnishing 



subsistence to hundreds of thousands more in its final manufacture, and 



thus becoming one of the most important wheels that give circulation to 



national wealth.^ 



But we must not confine our view to Europe. When silk was so scarce 



in this country, that James I., while King of Scotland, was forced to beg 



of the Earl of Mar the loan of a pair of silk stockings to appear in before 



the English ambassador, enforcing his request with the cogent appeal, 



" For ye would not, sure, that your king should appear as a scrub before 



strangers ;" nay, long before this period, even prior to the time that silk 



was valued at its weight of gold at Rome, and the Emperor Aurelian 



refused his empress a robe of silk because of its dearness — the Chinese 



peasantry in some of the provinces, millions in number, were clothed with 



this material ; and for some thousand years to the present time, it has 



been both there and in India (where a class whose occupation was to 



attend silk-worms appears to have existed from time immemorial, being 



mentioned in the oldest Sanscrit books,^) one of the chief objects of 



cultivation and manufacture. You will admit, therefore, that when nature 



" — set to work millions of spinning worms, 

 Tiiat in their green shops weave the smooih-hair'd silk 

 To deck her soas^," 



she was conferring upon them a benefit scarcely inferior to that consequent 

 upon the gift of wool to the fleecy race, or a fibrous rind to the flax or 

 hemp plants; and that mankind is not under much less obligation to Pam- 

 phila, who, according to Aristotle, was the discoverer of the art of un- 

 winding and weaving silk, than to the inventors of the spinning of those 

 products.^ 



It seems to have been in Asia that silk was first manufactured ; and it 

 was from thence that the ancients obtained it, calling it, from the name of 

 the country whence it was supposed to be brought, Sericum. Of its origin 

 they were in a great measure ignorant, some supposing it to be the entrails 

 of a spider-like insect with eight legs, which was fed for four years upon 

 a kind of paste, and then with the leaves of the green willow, until it 

 burst with fat^ ; others, that it was the produce of a worm which built 

 clay nests, and collected wax^ ; Aristotle, with more truth, that it was 



' The following facts and calculations from the Courier de Lyon, 1840, as to the silk 

 manufactured at Lyons, are worth preserving: — Raw silk annually consumed there one 

 million of kilogrammes, equal to 2,205,714 pounds English, on which the waste in manu- 

 facturing is five per cent. As four cocoons produce one graine (grain) of silk, four thou- 

 sand millions of cocoons are annually consumed, making the number of caterpillars reared 

 (including the average allowance for caterpillars dying, bad 'cocoons, and those kept for 

 eggs) 4,292,400,000. The length of the silk of one cocoon averages 500 metres (1526 feet 

 English), so that the length of the total quantity of silk spun at Lyons is 6,500,000,000,000 

 (or six and a half billions) of English feet, equal to fourteen times the mean radius of the 

 earth's orbit ; or 5194 times the radius of the moon's orbit; or 52.505 times the equatorial 

 circumference of the earth ; or 200,000 times the circumference of the moon. 



* Colebrook in Asiatic Researches, v. 61, ' Milton's Comus. 



* Hist. Animal. 1. v. c. 19. s Pausanias, quoted by Goldsmith, vi. 80. 

 8 Pliny, Hist. Nat. 1. xi. c. 22. 



