DIRECT BENEFITS DERIVED FROM INSECTS. 279 



splendour. We must consider it, what it actually is, as the 

 staple article of cultivation in many large provinces in the 

 south of Europe, amongst the inhabitants of which the 

 prospect of a deficient crop causes as great alarm as a scanty 

 harvest of grain v/ith us ; and after giving employment to 

 tens of thousands in its first production and transportation, 

 as furnishing subsistence to hundreds of thousands more in 

 its final manufacture, and thus becoming one of the most 

 important wheels that give circulation to national wealth.^ 



But we must not confine our view to Europe. When silk 

 was so scarce in this country, that James I., while King of 

 Scotland, was forced to beg of the Earl of Mar the loan of a 

 pair of silk stockings to appear in before the English am- 

 bassador, enforcing his request with the cogent appeal, " For 

 ye would not, sure, that your king should appear as a scrub 

 before strangers ; " nay, long before this period, even prior 

 to the time that silk was valued at its weight of gold at 

 E.ome, and the Emperor Aurelian refused his empress a robe 

 of silk because of its dearness — the Chinese peasantry in 

 some of the provinces, millions in number, were clothed with 

 this material; and for some thousand years to the present 

 time, it has been both there and in India (where a class 

 whose occupation was to attend silk- worms appears to have 

 existed from time immemorial, being mentioned in the oldest 

 Sanscrit books,^) one of the chief objects of cultivation 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 3, " 



she was conferring upon them a benefit scarcely inferior to 



1 The following facts and calculations from the Courier de Lyon, 1840, as to 

 the silk manufactured at Lyons, are worth preserving : — Raw silk annually con- 

 sumed there one million of kilogrammes, equal to 2,205,714 pounds English, on 

 which the waste in manufacturing is five per cent. As four cocoons produce 

 one graine (grain) of silk, four thousand millions of cocoons are annually con- 

 sumed, making the number of caterpillars reared (including the average allow- 

 ance for caterpillars dying, bad cocoons, and those kept for eggs) 4,292,400,000. 

 The length of the silk of one cocoon averages 500 metres (1526 feet English), 

 so that the length of the total quantity of silk spun at Lyons is 6,500,000,000,000 

 (or six and a half billions) of English feet, equal to fourteen times the mean 

 radius of the earth's orbit ; or 5494 times the radius of the moon's orbit ; or 

 52,505 times the equatorial circumference of the earth ; or 200,000 times the 

 circumference of the moon. 



2 Colebrook in Asiatic Researches, v. 61, 3 Milton's Comus. 



T 4 



