98 AGRICULTURAL REPORT. [March, 



not to a business to which we are wholly strangers ; it is not to 

 an empty, airy, and untried project ; for there has been some- 

 thing of this manufactory carried on for sundry years, and by a 

 number of our people in divers of our towns by which we are 

 assured that it is practicable.* As early as 1747, the governor 

 of Connecticut, Mr. Law, wore the first coat and stockings 

 made of New England silk ; and in 1750, his daughter wore 

 the first silk gown of domestic production. 



In an almanac of Nathaniel Ames, for the year 1769, it seems 

 the subject had been matter of much public discussion, and "a 

 gentleman, whom posterity will bless, deposited one hundred 

 dollars in the hands of the selectmen of Boston ; forty dollars to 

 be given to the person, who in the year 1771, shall have raised 

 the greatest quantity of mulberry trees ; thirty dollars to him 

 that shall have the next greatest number ; twenty to the next ; 

 and ten to the next ; certificate being produced from a justice 

 of the peace of the number, and that they belong to Mas- 

 sachusetts Bay." It is added that, " Justinian, the emperor, 

 looking upon it as a great hardship that his subjects should 

 buy the manufacture of the Persians at so dear a rate as a 

 pound of gold for a pound of silk, dispatched two monks into 

 India to discover and learn how the silk trade was managed 

 there ; and to bring a quantity of those insects from whom he 

 was informed the silk was produced, when they brought at a 

 second voyage, great quantity of silk worms' eggs." This 

 writer adds, " It is but of late years that the Europeans fell 

 into the way of cultivating any quantity of raw silk. The 

 Italians led the way ; and they have been followed with great 

 success by the French ; and the advantages thereof to these 

 nations are amazing, as they supply Great Britain with raw 

 silk for the thousands of spinners and weavers constantly em- 

 ployed in Spitalfields. It being certain that raw silk is plenti- 

 fully raised in much more northern climates than this, we 

 have a most promising prospect of one day turning the constant 



p. 129. 



