282 DIRECT BENEFITS DERIVED FROM INSECTS. 



matchlock barrel to the stock ; but as far as Colonel Sykes 

 could ascertain, no use is made of the silk in Western India, 

 though there can be little doubt that it might be advanta- 

 geously produced, as the caterpillars which spin it feed in- 

 discriminately on the Teak tree ( Tectona grandis), the Mul- 

 berry (^Morus Indica), the Bor (^Zizyphus jujuba\ and the 

 Osana ( Terminalia alata glabra).^ 



Other species, as may be inferred from an extract of a 

 letter given in Young's Annals of Agriculture ^, are known in 

 China, and have been introduced into India. "We have 

 obtained," says the writer, " a monthly silk-worm from China, 

 which I have reared with my own hands, and in twenty-five 

 days have had the cocoons in my basins, and by the twenty- 

 ninth or thirty-first day a new progeny feeding in my trays. 

 This makes it a mine to whoever would undertake the culti- 

 vation of it." 



Whether it will ever be expedient to attempt the breeding 

 of the larvae of any European moths, as Catocala pacta, 

 Sponsa, &c. proposed with this view by Fabricius^, seems 

 doubtful, though certainly many of them afibrd a very strong 

 silk, and might be readily propagated ; and I have now in 

 my possession some thread more like cotton than silk spun 

 by the larva of a moth, which when I was a very young en- 

 tomologist I observed (if my memory does not deceive me) 

 upon the Euonymus, and from the twigs of which (not the 

 cocoon) I unwound it. It is even asserted that in Germany 

 a manufacture of silk from the cocoons of the emperor moth 

 (^Saturnia Pavonia major) was at one time established.* 

 There seems no question, however, that silk might be advan- 

 tageously derived from many native silk-Avorms in America. 

 An account is given in the Philosophical Transactions of one 

 found there, whose cocoon is not only heavier and more pro- 

 ductive of silk than that of the common kind, but is so much 

 stronger that twenty threads will carry an ounce more.^ 

 Don Luis Nee observed on Psidium pomiferum and pyriferum 

 ovate nests of caterpillars eight inches long, of grey silk. 



1 Trans. Royal Asiat. Soc. 1834. vol. iii. 



^ Vorlesungen, 325. 



5 PuUein in Fhil Trans. 1759. 54. 



5 xxiii. 235. 



4 Latr, Hist. Nat. xiv. 150. 



