188 DIRECT BENEFITS DERIVED FROM INSECTS. 



hives, which were transporting from a region where the season for flowers 

 had passed, to one where the spring was later. 1 Columella says that the 

 Greeks in like manner sent their bee-hives every year from Achaia into 

 Attica ; and a similar custom is not unknown in Italy, and even in this 

 country in the neighbourhood of heaths. In Madagascar, according to 

 Latreille, the inhabitants have domesticated Apis unicolor ; A. indica is 

 cultivated in India at Pondicherry and in Bengal ; A. Adansonii Latr. at 

 Senegal 3 ; and Fabricius thinks that A. acraensis (Centris Syst. Piez.) 

 laboriosa, and others in the East and West Indies, might be domesticated 

 with greater advantage than even A. mellifica. 3 



Here also must be mentioned the manna used as an agreeable food in 

 the East, which, though not directly produced by insects, is caused to 

 flow from the Tamarix mannifera by the punctures of a small species of 

 Coccus.* 



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 actually is, as the staple 

 article of cultivation in many large provinces in the south of Europe, 

 amongst the inhabitants of which the prospect of a deficient crop causes 

 as great alarm as a scanty harvest of grain with us ; and after giving em- 

 ployment to tens of thousands in its first production and transportation, 

 as furnishing subsistence to hundreds of thousands more in its final manu- 

 facture, and thus becoming one of the most important wheels that give 

 circulation to national wealth. 5 



But we must not confine our view to Europe. When silk was so scarce 

 in this country, that James I., 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 re- 

 fused 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 



1 Latr. Hist. Nat. xiv. 20. 



2 Latr. in Humboldt and Bonpland, Recueil, &c. 302. 



3 Vorlesungen, 324. * Burmeister, Manual of Ent. 561. 



5 The following facts and calculations from the Courrier de Lyon, 1840, as to the 

 silk manufactured at Lyons, are worth preserving : Raw silk annually consumed 

 there one million of kilogrammes, equal to 2,205,714 pounds English, on which the 

 waste in manufacturing is five per cent. As four cocoons produce one graine (grain) 

 of silk, four thousand millions of cocoons are annually consumed, making the num- 

 ber of caterpillars reared (including the average allowance for caterpillars dying, 

 bad cocoons, and those kept for eggs) 4,292,400,000. The length of the silk of one 

 cocoon averages 500 metres (1526 feet English), so that the lengtH of the total quan- 

 tity of silk spun at Lyons is 6,000,000,000,000 (or six and a half billions) of English 

 feet, equal to fourteen times the mean radius of the earth's orbit ; or 5494 times the 

 radius of the moon's orbit ; or 52,505 times the equatorial circumference of the 

 earth ; or 200,000 times the circumference of the moon. 



