332 DIRECT BENEFITS DERIVED FROM INSECTS. 



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 ac- 

 tually is, as the staple article of cultivation in many large 

 provinces in the South of Europe, amongst the inha- 

 bitants 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 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 



