DIRECT BENEFITS DERIVED FROM INSECTS. 331 



'Nile, between Cairo and Damietta, with a convoy of 

 4000 hives, which were transporting from a region 

 where the season for flowers had passed, to one where 

 the spring was later ^. Columella says that the Greeks 

 in like manner sent their bee-hives every year from 

 Achaia into Attica ; and a similar custom is not un- 

 known in Italy, and even in this country in the neigh- 

 bourhood of heaths. In Madagascar, according to La- 

 treille,t]ie inhabitants have domesticated Apis unicolor; 

 A. indica is cultivated in India at Pondicherry and in 

 Bengal; A. Adansonii, Latr. at SenegaP; and Fabri- 

 cius thinks that A. acraensis (Centris, Syst. Piez.) la- 

 boriosa, and others in the East and West Indies, might 

 be domesticated with greater advantage than even 

 A. melli/ica''. 



The last, and doubtless the most valuable, product of 

 insects to which I have to advert is Silk. To estimate 

 justly the importance of this article, it is not sufficient 

 to view it as an appendage of luxury unrivalled for 

 richness, lustre, and beauty; and without which courts 

 would lose half their splendour. 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 im- 

 portant wheels that give circulation to national wealth. 



* Latr. Hist. Nat. xiv. 20. 



* Latr. in Humboldt and Bonpland, RecudI, &c, 302. 

 " Vorksungen, 324. 



