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remember, while in England, in my younger years, the first existence and 
sudden rise of this useful Society, by the public spirit of Mr. Shipley, whose 
name was ever since respectable to me. 
I dare not intrude on your time, so usefully employed for the public 
good of your country, to expatiate on the many articles I most admired, but 
especially the encouragement of plantations, by which the Society will be 
the benefactor of ages to come: yet one article struck me, for its not answer¬ 
ing the expectations and repeated laudable exertions of the Society; I mean, 
the cultivation of Silk and the Mulberry-tree, an object so worthy the 
Society's attention. 
I will venture to justify the trouble I am going to give you, Sir, by this 
long letter, in saying something which may appear of some use on that score. 
You will smile to hear a man living under the 58th degree of latitude, and 
so much to the east as beyond the Baltic, speak of the cultivation of the 
Mulberry-tree and rearing of Silkworms; yet I hope to win your indulgence, 
perhaps your candid approbation of some of my thoughts. Many thousands 
of English nobility and gentry travelled, rambled, even lived, in Italy and 
the South of France; numbers of them I have seen and known there; 
but none cared to enquire about the Silkworm, and its prodigous work: 
amusements chiefly took up their time; of a few, antiquities, statues, 
paintings, of which, be it said to their honour, no nation has made so rich 
a harvest on the hungry Italians, preying on the wealth of the English 
travellers. 
But to come to the Silkworms.—While I served, in the year \’J6S 9 in 
the Russian army, in Pomerania, particularly near the coast of the Baltic, I 
had the good luck, being quarter-master general of a division, to be near a 
considerable corn field belonging to a gentleman; this produced an acquaint¬ 
ance with the owner: having seen many of his plantations of Mulberry- 
trees, of both sorts, he told me their use, and shewed me their produce. 
I requested some seeds of both, and the model of a spinning wheel. 
Some of the seeds were sown at a villa near St. Petersburgh, belonging 
to an uncle of mine; they always froze to the earth; yet in the following 
years would rise as high as three or four feet, in several branches, and give, 
with a few larger trees in the green-house, food for three thousand Silk¬ 
worms, which gave near a pound of silk. But this essay had no followers, 
and is now no more. 
