142 NORTH AMERICAN INSECTS. 



Ileliogabalus dressed themselves throughout in silk ; but 

 Aurelian was so impolite and so penurious that he refused 

 even his empress a robe of silk on account of its costliness. 



Kirby and Spence, in their " Introduction to Entomol- 

 ogy," mention that "James the First, 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 embassador, 

 enforcing his request with the cogent appeal, l For ye would 

 not, sure, that your king should appear as a scrub before 

 strangers.' " 



Aristotle, in the third century B.C., and Pliny, in the 

 first century A.D., both speak of the use of silk. 



The ancient Greeks and Romans procured their silk from 

 Persia, in which country silk-worms have been raised from 

 the remotest antiquity. And when I saw the great num- 

 ber of wild silk-worms in Cachetia, Imcritia, Mingrelia, 

 Georgia, Shirvan, and Dagestan (the modern provinces of 

 ancient Media), as far as to the heights of the Caucasus, 

 near Tiflis, the idea occurred to me that the fabulous story 

 of the golden fleece of the Argonauts must have had its or- 

 igin or reference to that rich silk country. These beauti- 

 ful provinces are now in the possession of Russia, and are 

 called Transcaucasia, and they, with the Crimea, form 

 the richest and most productive countries of the Russian 

 empire. 



These Elysian fields induced my friend Castellas, of Par- 

 is, now deceased, to settle in Tiflis, and, encouraged by the 

 Emperor Nicholas in 1826, to erect large establishments 

 for the cultivation of silk in Tiflis, Karaback, Shirvan, 

 Noukha, and Imeritia, of which he showed me the plans 

 when I was there in 1825. In these vast establishments 

 he employed twenty-seven thousand hands, including eight 

 hundred Italian men and women ; and in the first year of 

 their operation 1,200,000 pounds of fine floss-silk were pro- 

 duced and sold, which, valued at four dollars per pound, 



