REPORT ON THE DISEASES OF SILKWORMS IN INDIA 5 



mistake made was in doing things on too big a scale. Mukerji was 

 right. Sericulture is a cottage industry, and disease can be kept in 

 check only when relatively small numbers of worms are kept 

 together. 



With such experiments and controversies the regime of N. G. 

 Mukerji in Bengal sericulture was concerned. 



In passing, another name, that of Cleghorn, which is honourably 

 associated with. Bengal sericulture, may be mentioned. He paid 

 much attention to hybridization and selection, but to him we are 

 indebted for the fullest account of the Bengal silk fly. Unfortu- 

 nately he does not seem to have been in favour of microscopic 

 sllection of seed, so that the weight of his influence was not thrown 

 always into the right scale. 



But sericulture continued to languish. Another government 

 committee was appointed in 1908, and a number of recommendations 

 were made and not — as a rule — carried out. The work of the seed 

 supply stations went on but the most important work seems to have 

 been that of hybridization, which had been repeatedly tried in the 

 past and had failed, and which up to the present has not yielded — ■ 

 as far as I can see — very encouraging results. 



In other parts of India during the period from 1890 to about 

 1914 very little was done on a large scale — except in Kashmir where 

 a flourishing industry was established, and where disease has been 

 more or less got under control. In Mysore the silk industry is 

 comparatively modern, having been introduced about 1780 by Tippu 

 Sultan : Lefroy (1916) calls this an old industry but compared with 

 other regions it cannot be considered as other than young. After 

 the English took possession of this State, serious attempts were made 

 to encourage sericulture, but by 1870 they had nearly all been 

 abandoned on account of failures due evidently to disease. The 

 industry remained in a very decaying condition until the second 

 decade of the present century when the Government took it up,, 

 and with the help of Italian and Japanese experts got a thoroughly 

 satisfactory Department of Sericulture started. Under the ener- 

 getic and wise management of the present Superintendent of Seri- 

 culture, the department is doing excellent work in all branches of 

 sericulture and diseases are being very efficiently controlled. In 

 other parts of India sericulture is not an industry of any size with 

 perhaps the exception of Assam. In this province, however, it is 

 only within the last year or two that any attempt has been made 

 to organize sericulture. 



Much of the recent advance in sericulture in India is doubtless 

 due to economic reasons, but possibly Lefroy's enquiry into Indian 

 sericulture in 1915 has had something to do with it. In this the 



