DIRECT BENEFITS DERIVED FROM INSECTS. 335 



being seldom sufficient to wear out a garment made of 

 it. It is used not only for clothing, but for packing fine 

 cloths,&c. Some manufacturers in England to whom the 

 silk was shown, seemed to think that it could be made 

 here into shawls equal to any received from India. 



Other species, as may be inferred from an extract of 

 a letter given in Young's Annals of Agriculture^^ are 

 known in China, and have been recently introduced 

 into India. " We have obtained," says the writer, 

 " a monthly silk- worm from China, which I have reared 

 with my own hands, and in twenty-five days have had 

 the cocoons in my basins, and by the twenty-ninth or 

 thirty-first day a new progeny feeding in my trays. 

 This makes it a mine to whoever would undertake the 

 cultivation of it." 



Whether it will ever be expedient to attempt the 

 breeding of the larvae of any European moths, as Noctua 

 pacta^ Sponsa, &c. proposed with this view by Fabri- 

 cius'', seems doubtful, though certainly many of them 

 afford a very strong silk, and might be readily propa- 

 gated ; and I have now in my possession some thread 

 more like cotton than silk spun by the larva of a moth, 

 which when I was a very young entomologist I observed 

 (if my memory does not deceive me) upon the Euony- 

 mus, and from the twigs of which (not the cocoon) I 

 unwound it. It is even asserted that in Germany a ma- 

 nufacture of silk from the cocoons of the emperor moth 

 (Bombi/jc Pavonia) has been established *=. There 

 seems no question, however, that silk might be advan- 

 tageously derived from many native silk-worms in 

 America. Ah account is given in the Philosophical 



' xxiii. 235. " Forlesmigen, 325. " Latr. Ilisf. Na(. xiv. 150. 



