Many of the larvæ of the European moths afford a very strong silk, and it is said, that a manufacture of silk from the cocoons of the emperor moth was at one time established in Germany. There is no doubt, however, that silk might be collected in abundance from many native silkworms in America. Cocoons have been described eight inches long, made of grey silk, which the inhabitants of Chilpancingo, Tixtala, and other places in South America, manufacture into stockings and handkerchiefs. Humboldt also observed similar nests in the provinces of Mechoacan, and the mountains of Santa Rosa; they were of dense tissue, resembling Chinese paper, of a brilliant whiteness, and formed of distinct and separate layers. The interior layers, which are the thinnest, and of extraordinary transparency, were used by the ancient Mexicans as writing tablets. [Illustration] CHAPTER II. MANUFACTURE OF SILK BY THE SILKWORM. We now come to the most important of all silk-spinning insects, the common silkworm, or caterpillar of the mulberry-tree moth. The labours of this insect were known and appreciated in other parts of the world long before we had tidings of its existence; so that the peasantry of other lands were clad in raiment which our kings would have been proud to wear. “When silk was so scarce in this country that James the First, 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 ambassador, 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 in gold at Rome, 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 silkworms 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-haired silk To deck her sons, she was conferring upon them a benefit scarcely inferior to that consequent 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 inventors of the spinning of those products.” [Illustration: EGGS AND SILKWORMS IN THE FIRST AGE. ]