DIRECT BENEFITS DERIVED FROM INSECTS. 189 
mentioned in the oldest Sanscrit books *), one of the chief objects of culti- 
vation and manufacture. You will admit, therefore, that when nature 
“«— set to work millions of spinning worms, 
That in their green shops weave the smooth-hair’d silk 
To deck her sons,”? 
she was conferring upon them a benefit scarcely inferior to that con- 
sequent upon the gift of wool to the fleecy race, or a fibrous rind to the 
flax or hemp plants; and that mankind is not under much less obligation 
to Pamphila, who, according to Aristotle, was the discoverer of the art of 
unwinding and weaving silk, than to the inyentors of the spinning of those 
products.* 
It seems to have been in Asia that silk was first manufactured ; and it 
was from thence that the ancients obtained it, calling it, from the name of 
the country whence it was supposed to be brought, Sericum. Of its origin 
they were in a great measure ignorant, some supposing it to be the entrails 
of a spider-like insect with eight legs, which was fed for four years upon a 
kind of paste, and then with the leaves of the green willow, until it burst 
with fat*; others that it was the produce of a worm which built clay nests, 
and collected wax >; Aristotle, with more truth, that it was unwound from 
the pupa of a large horned caterpillar.6 Nor was the mode of producing 
and manufacturing this precious material known to Europe until long after 
the Christian era, being first learnt about the year 550, by two monks, 
who procured in India the eggs of the silk-worm moth, with which, con- 
cealing them in hollow canes, they hastened to Constantinople, where they 
speedily multiplied, and were subsequently introduced into Italy, of which 
country silk was long a peculiar and staple commodity. It was not cul- 
tivated in France until the time of Henry TV., who, considering that mul- 
berries grew in his kingdom as well as in Italy, resolved, in opposition to 
the opinion of Sully, to attempt introducing it, and fully succeeded. 
The whole of the silk produced in Europe, and the greater proportion 
of that manufactured in China, is obtained from the common silk-worm ; 
but in India considerable quantities are procured from the cocoons of the 
larvee of other moths. Of these the most important species known are 
the Tusseh and Arindy silk-worms, of which an interesting history is given 
by Dr. Roxburgh in the Linnean Transactions.’ These insects are both 
natives of Bengal. The first (Saturnia Paphia) feeds upon the leaves of 
the Jujube tree (Rhamnus Jujuba), or Byer of the Hindoos, and of the 
Terminalia alata glabra Roxburgh, the Asseen of the Hindoos, and is found 
in such abundance as from time immemorial to have afforded a constant 
supply of a very durable, coarse, dark-coloured silk, which is woven into 
a cloth called Tussehdoot’hies, much worn by the Brahmins and other sects, 
and would, doubtless, be highly useful to the inhabitants of many parts of 
America, and of the south of Europe, where a light and cool, and at the 
1 Colebrook in Asiatic Researches, v. 61. 2 Milton’s Comus. 
5 Hist, Animal. 1. v. ¢. 19. 4 Pausanias, quoted by Goldsmith, vi. 80. 
5 Pliny, Hist. Nat. 1. xi. ¢. 22. . 
® Aristot. ubi supr. He does not expressly say the pupa, but this we must sup- 
pose. The larva he means could not be the common silkworm, since he describes it 
as large, and having as it were horns. 
7 vii, 83—48, Compare Lord Valentia’s Travels, i. 78. 
