18 



Dheemurs carefully abstain from flesh, fish, or haldi as their 

 food, nor do they cut their hair or shave, and carefully 

 deny themselves all ablution. When the cocoons are 

 formed they are collected into a heap, and a goat, pig, or 

 fowl is sacrificed to Mahadeo in his form Jogni ; the Wood 

 is sprinkled over the cocoons, and, after a bout of liquor, 

 are taken home. On the third day following the Dheemurs 

 shave and resume their normal condition *"j 



The caterpillars moult five times, at intervals of from 

 five to eight days. When first hatched they weigh but -i 

 of a grain, and are about £ of an inch long ; but at the end 

 of their larval existence, which is from forty to forty-five 

 days, they have attained a size of seven inches long, one 

 inch in diameter, and weigh about 370 grains (Plate III.) 

 They then begin to spin their cocoons, which are of an egg 

 shape and silvery drab in colour (Plate IV., Fig. 1). The 

 silk is all regularly deposited in a compact manner, resem- 

 bling in substance the shell of an egg (Plate IV., Fig. 2). 



The cocoons vary much in size. The largest I have seen 

 are from Sambulpoor, and are two inches long and 1£ 

 inches in diameter. The weight of the large cocoons is, 

 without the pupa and supporting pedicle, 28 grains ; the 

 ordinary size 16 grains. Mr. H. Meyer, of Milan, has reeled 

 for me an unbroken double thread from one cocoon, which 

 weighs 12 grains, and measures 1,332 yards, or a little more 

 than three quarters of a mile. 



Major Coussmaker remarks f : — 



" As a rule, there are certainly two crops in the year ; 

 the moths of the first batch come out in about four or six 

 weeks after the first lot of worms (which come out at the 

 commencement of the rains) have spun; those of the second 

 batch remain quiescent until the rains begin again, that is 

 to say, until May. As this entails the chrysalis remaining 

 in the cocoon as long as eight months, exposed to the 

 hottest sun and occasional thunderstorms, the cocoon had 

 need to be made a hard impenetrable material; so inde- 

 structible is it, that Bheels and and other tribes which live 

 in the jungles use the cocoon as an extinguisher to the 

 bamboo tube in which they keep the " falita " or cotton- 

 rope tinder used by them for lighting their tobacco and 

 the slow matches of their matchlocks. The cocoon is also 

 cut into a long spiral band, and used for binding the barrel 

 of matchlocks to the 'stocks, being, as the natives say, un- 



* Captain Brooke, as quoted in Geoghegan, " Silk Industry of India, " p. 1 10. 

 f "The Tusser Silkworm," p. 9, 1873. 



