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produce would prove a very valuable commodity for export, but 

 the cost of manufacturing the silk of the required quality proves 

 prohibitive at present. This remark especially applies to silk of 

 the Moongah cocoons of Assam, made by the ordinary native 

 process ; it is wholly unsuitable for the European market, but it 

 could not be manufactured to suit the latter at a cost which 

 buyers for that market could afford to pay. There is such a 

 quantity of gummy matter in the wild cocoon that the thread of 

 it cannot be unwound without much more difficulty than is met 

 with in spinning the thread of the yellow cocoon from which 

 Bengal raw silk is made ; and as yet no experiments for 

 unwinding the former by any other than the native methods have 

 proved successful. 



3. The eggs of the wild silkworm could easily be procured for 

 export ; but Mr. Veyrin fears that unless the worms from them 

 can be fed on leaves of the trees on which they feed in this 

 country, they would perish. In Assam the Moongha cocoon is 

 fed solely on the tree known to botanists as the Jetrantena 

 quadrifolia, called by the natives the soom tree. Erom this cocoon 

 is made the bulk of the silk used by the natives of that province. 

 Their priests use cloth made of silk of the Mezan koonee cocoon, 

 of a quality much better than that of the Moongha. Another 

 kind of silk is made by them from the Erea cocoon, fed on the 

 castor-oil tree. This cocoon is of a very large size when full- 

 grown ; the silk is not unwound from it, but is taken much as 

 cotton is taken from the pod of very short fibre. The wild 

 cocoons of Bancoorah and Beerbhoom are fed entirely on the sal 

 tree, which abounds throughout the jungles. 



4. The breed of silkworm from which the silk known as Bengal 

 raw silk is made is the Hoinbyx Mari, and is reared very exten- 

 sively throughout the cultivated districts of Lower Bengal. There 

 are two distinct families of this worm ; one of these propagates 

 its species only once in a year, but of the other six or seven gene- 

 rations successively are produced in one year from one pair of 

 moths. The former is the kind from which silk is produced in 

 Europe, Japan, and China ; the latter seems peculiar to Bengal, 

 and is the only kind of worm from which Bengal silk is made, as 

 a rule, though the other is not unknown in the province, but is 

 so much less productive that the natives find little inducement to 

 rear it. Though much more silk is produced from the worm 

 which propagates the more frequently of the two, its cocoons are 

 in every way inferior to those of the other family, and the silk 

 made from them is never equal in point of quality to that of 

 Europe, Japan, and China. 



5. From natives intimately acquainted with the process I have 

 the following particulars descriptive of the method followed in 

 producing cocoons: A native considers one pound weight of 

 eggs sufficient to commence with, for which he pays two or three 



