332 DIRECT BENEFITS DERIVED FROM INSECTS. 



But we must not confine our view to Europe. When 

 silk was so scarce in this country, that James the First, 

 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. 

 That in their green shops weave the smooth-hair'd silk 

 To deck her sons*"," 



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 unwinding and weaving silk, than to the 

 inventors of the spinning of those products''. 



^ Colebrook in Asiatic Researc7ies,v. 61. " Milton's Comus. 



*' Hist. Jnimal. 1. v. c. 19. A French gentleman, M. Vaucanson, has 

 invented a mill for unwinding the cocoons of the silk-worm. Scott's 

 Visit to Fans, 4th ed. 304. 



