416 APPENDIX, 



the city, and passed directly beneath her window, she counted Up- 

 wards of two hundred individuals, each driving before him a horse, 

 mule, or donkey, and bearing boughs and foliage of the mulberry, 

 compactly loaded. These mulberries, covering the immense plain, 

 are each year cut down to the trunk closely. In the height of enm- 

 mer, the far-spreading mulberry woods assume the appearance of the 

 locust-blighted landscape ; every tree being left a branchless trunk, 

 without a sign of foliage. 



CHAPTER VIII. CLIMATE, HABITS, AND MANAGEMENT 

 OF THE SILK-WORM. 



Wherever the mulberry finds a congenial climate and soil, there 

 also the silk-worm will flourish ; such a climate and soil, and such 

 a country, is ours throughout its whole extent, from its eastern to its 

 western shores. 



The silk-worm is a native of China, a country famous from re- 

 mote antiquity for its silk, and renowned for its industry, a parallel 

 only to our own in all its various climates, and divers latitudes, in all 

 its extraordinary vicissitudes of heat and cold. From China, also, we 

 derive the tree, the essential food on which the insect most delights 

 to feed. Transported to our shores, the silk- worm of Asia has here 

 found a genial climate, a salubrious atmosphere, and the abundant 

 pasture so well suited to all its wants. Wherever the Indian corn 

 will mature its seeds, wherever the peach will mature its fruits, 

 there also the mulberry and the silk-worms will flourish with ex- 

 traordinary luxuriance, as in their native clime. 



Serene skies and days of unusual brightness are the characteris- 

 tics of our climate; those days of continuous heat, of brilliant 

 light and sunshine, being necessary, and these alone being all- 

 eufRcient duly to mature and to elaborate the juices of the leaves 

 of the mulberry in all its varieties, thus converting them into the 

 most healthy and nutritious food. Not every country is thus highly 

 favored by nature. 



In England, first of all countries for its agriculture, they cannot 

 raise silk, how much soever they consume. There, owing to the 

 coldness and humidity of their climate, as their latest writers assure 

 us, the mulberry in all its varieties will not mature its leaf, so as to 

 become the wholesome and nutritious food of the silk-worm. (See 

 the popular Encyclopedia now publishing in London, article Morns.) 

 Neither will the Indian corn mature its seeds, nor the peach ripen its 

 fruit, in open culture, in that climate and country. 



In Europe, they usually lose from 35 to 60 per cent, of their silk- 

 worms ; the latter being the usual loss among the peasants. And, 

 according to M. Beauvais, while the French have usually lost near 

 50 per cent, of their silk- worms, the Chinese, according to their 

 best historians, lose not one in a hundred. This is in a measure to 

 be ascribed to their superior climate ; but in part, also, it is justly due 

 to their superior skill and management. In part, also, it may be 

 ascribed to their rejecting, in the first instance and invariably, those 



