102 AGRICULTURAL REPORT. [March, 



traordinary dimensions and expense, and the reiterated and 

 extravagant calculations of profit, which were to follow from the 

 culture of silk, continually given to the public in the most im- 

 posing forms, and the establishment of societies in all parts of 

 the country, with large capitals for this object, kept the curiosi- 

 ty and interest of the public constantly upon the stretch. The 

 announced introduction of varieties of the mulberry, of such 

 hardihood as to brave the severity of our climate, and especial- 

 ly the adoption of a plan for taking up the tender varieties and 

 resetting them, or laying them down in the spring ; and the 

 practicableness in this way of obtaining in the same season 

 from trees thus managed, an ample supply of food for the 

 worms, seemed to give strong assurance that the bright hopes 

 which had been indulged on this subject, were at least, in some 

 degree, on the point of being realized. 



In the year 1838, a new chapter in the history of the silk cul- 

 ture was to be unfolded. There is little reason to doubt, that, 

 at this time, a conspiracy or combination of some principal in- 

 dividuals, deeply interested in the Multicaulis in the United 

 States, was formed, in order to force the sales of this tree at 

 high prices. By every species of finesse, and by the grossest 

 impositions, the public pulse was quickened to a rapidity and 

 intensity of circulation almost unparalleled in the history of the 

 excitements of the human mind. The selling of spurious seed, 

 the disposal of trees under false names, the selling for Multi- 

 caulis that which did not even belong to the species of the 

 mulberry, and especially the villany, for it deserves no milder 

 name, and should shut out its perpetrators from all community 

 with honest men, of getting up extensive auction sales of Multi- 

 caulis trees, which were purely fictitious, and this with no other 

 view than that of fraudulent wholesale imposition upon the 

 public, present facts in the history of our community equally 

 remarkable and disgraceful. They are instructive monuments 

 to mark the extremes to which, under the influence of an un- 

 bridled avarice, the cunning of some men will proceed, and 

 the credulity of others may be led. In these circumstances 

 the public attention was directed exclusively to the growing of 



