acquire, and the promptitude with which they are re- 

 newed. 



The fruit is long, black, and of good flavor. This 

 mulberry should be cultivated low in rows, and never 

 suffered to rise high. A few years will be sufficient to 

 raise considerable fields of it in full vigor in California, 

 sufficient to support an immense quantity of silkworms. 



Second, MORUS ALBA, or white mulberry, a native of 

 China, but for centuries naturalized in Italy, and there- 

 fore also called the Italica. This tree is of rapid 

 growth, and extensively known for the uses of its leaf 

 as the food of silkworms. The leaves are pointed, cor- 

 date, serrate, entire, or lobed, but vary in the different 

 sub-varieties, sometimes even in the same tree, in dif- 

 ferent ages, being at times lobed, when young, but when 

 old, entire ; and very often they are entire and lobed on 

 the same tree at the same time. 



The bark of the wood is of an ash color. The fruit 

 is white, roundish, oblong, of an insipid taste. The tree, 

 as before noted, is valuable for its timber, and exceed- 

 ingly long-lived. In cold climates it grows slowly, yet 

 its growth is more rapid, and it comes into leaf earlier 

 than the morus nigra, and is not, like that variety, in- 

 commoded by a profusion of fruit ; and although the 

 black mulberry is preferred in Persia, Count Dandolo 

 affirms that the white mulberry was found to produce 

 the finest silk of the kind known in Italy. It is also af- 

 firmed, that if the leaves of this species, and those of the 

 rubra and nigra, be presented to the, insect at the same- 

 time, it will eat first the white, next of the red, and last 



