THE INTELLECTUAL OBSERVER. 



MAY, 1867. 



THE NEW OAK-FEEDING SILKWORM OF CHINA. 



BY JOHN E. JACKSON, 



Curator of the Museum, Royal Gardens, Kew. 



(With a Coloured Plate.) 



In years gone by, when the present generation of men were 

 "boys at school, almost the first lesson learnt in Natural History 

 was the rearing and cultivation of silkworms. If our self- 

 imposed lessons in sericulture were calculated to implant a 

 taste in this direction for development on a larger scale in after 

 life, what a nation of silk cultivators we should by this time 

 have been. We, as boys, used to look upon the little creatures 

 so busy enclosing themselves in their silken houses, and think 

 it almost past belief that our mothers' and sisters' dresses could 

 be composed of so many of those silky cocoons. Since the 

 days of which we speak a great revolution has taken place in 

 the culture of silkworms, and boys in these days could scarcely 

 be expected to keep themselves posted up in all the newly 

 introduced insects. 



The disease which has made such ravages amongst the 

 Boinbyx mori, or common mulberry-feeding silkworm, in the 

 South of Europe, has been the means of directing attention 

 to new sources for a supply, or at least for aids to the ordinary 

 supply of silk. This, like the cotton, the paper, and the 

 cinchona questions, has become one of great importance. In 

 the great silk cultivating districts in the South of Europe a 

 failure in the supply of this article would, to those populations, 

 be as keenly felt as the cotton famine was to our own opera- 

 tives a few years since, besides seriously affecting one of our 

 home industrial classes, the silk weavers. Science has also 

 gained something, and will probably gain more, from the experi- 

 ments in the acclimatization of these insects, as in the case of 

 the Boinbyx Cynthia, or ailanthus worm, which is proved not 

 only to exist, but even to be more healthy and vigorous in this 

 country than in France. It is now about ten years since the 

 Bombyx Cynthia was first reared in Europe, and since then 



VOL. xi. — NO. IV. K 



