DIRECT BENEFITS DERIVED FROM INSECTS. 333 



books*,) one of the chief objects of cultivation and manu- 

 facture. 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 V* 



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 Pamphila, 

 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 c . 



It seems to have been in Asia that silk was first ma- 

 nufactured ; and it was from thence that the ancients ob- 

 tained it, calling it, from the name of the country whence 

 it was supposed to be brought, Sericum. Of its origin 

 they were in a great measure ignorant, some supposing 

 it to be the entrails of a spider-like insect with eight legs, 

 which was fed for four years upon a kind of paste, and 

 then with the leaves of the green willow, until it burst 

 with fat d ; others, that it was the produce of a worm 

 which built clay nests and collected wax e ; Aristotle, 

 with more truth, that it was unwound from the pupa of 

 a large horned caterpillar f . Nor was the mode of pro- 



a Colebrook in Asiatic Researches, v. 61. b Milton's Comus. 



c Hist. Animal. 1. v. c. 19. A French gentleman, M. Vaucanson, 

 has invented a mill for unwinding the cocoons of the silkworm. 

 Scott's Visit to Paris, 4th ed. 304. 



* Pausanias, quoted by Goldsmith, vi. 80. 



e Pliny Hist. Nat. 1. xi. c. 22. 



{ Aristot. ubi supr. He does not expressly say the pupa, but this we 

 must suppose. The larva he means could not be the common silk- 

 worm, since he describes it as large, and having as it were horns. 



