Book Description

Excerpt from Silkworms "Patience and perseverance turn mulberry leaves into the silken robes of a queen." So runs an ancient Eastern proverb, which, if we strip it of its metaphorical signification, and regard it simply as a compendious method of stating what results when a certain series of natural processes is supplemented by the industry and artistic skill of human kind, may be appropriately placed at the head of our first chapter, as indicating the nature of the facts this little volume is intended to detail and illustrate. The fortunes of the silkworm and the mulberry tree are indissolubly associated, and when man steps in and patronizes the union between the two, there results an industry which has for ages been the support of millions of his race, and has supplied him with the most gorgeous of all those fabrics with which it has ever been his delight to adorn his person. If we enquire who first kept silkworms, and whether they were kept for pleasure or for profit, we shall find that, while it is easy enough to give a traditional reply which has all the sanction of a very hoary antiquity, it is not by any means so easy to say how much reliance may be placed on this, and how far it represents actual history; for the silkworm is now so entirely a domesticated animal, that, like the dog and some other of mans dumb friends, it is not met with in the wild state, at least in the form in which it is reared, and but for mans care would, in the course of a twelvemonth, disappear from the face of the earth. So long has it been a companion of man, that the history of the first reclamation from the wild state of the "dog of insects," as it has been termed by one writer, is mixed up with myth and fable, and well-nigh lost in the mists of antiquity. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.