142 NORTH AMERICAN INSECTS. 
Heliogabalus dressed themselves throughout in silk; but 
Aurelian was so impolite and so penurious that he refused 
even his empress a robe of silk on account of its costliness. 
Kirby and Spence, in their “ Introduction to Entomol- 
ogy,” mention that “James the First, 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 embassador, 
enforcing his request with the cogent appeal, ‘ 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 num- 
ber of wild silk-worms in Cachetia, Imeritia, 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 or- 
igin or reference to that rich silk country. These beauti- 
ful 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 Par- 
is, now deceased, to settle in Tiflis, and, encouraged by the 
Emperor Nicholas in 1826, to erect large establishments 
for the cultivation of silk in Tiflis, Karaback, Shirvan, 
Noukha, and Imeritia, of which he showed me the plans 
when I was there in 4825. In these vast establishments 
he employed twenty-seven thousand hands, including eight 
hundred Italian men and women; and in the first year of 
their operation 1,200,000 pounds of fine floss-silk were pro- 
duced and sold, which, valued at four dollars per pound, 
