The success of the French king caused, at the time, many attempts to breed the worms to be made in England, but they all appear to have been unsuccessful, and the same result attended experiments made in our American colonies. In the year 1825, a company was formed, entitled 'the British, Irish, and Colonial Silk Company;' about eighty acres of ground were purchased near Michelstown, in the county of Cork, and the whole were planted with white mulberry-trees. The rearing of the worms was confided to an experienced foreigner, Count Dandolo, but, from some reason or other, the undertaking was abandoned. The cause of such repeated failures is not thoroughly understood; the severity of the climate has been assigned as a reason, but silk has been successfully produced in some parts of Prussia, and the climate of Pekin, in China, is colder than that of Scotland. But whatever success might attend an experiment of the sort, it is clear that, in a mercantile point of view, the project would never succeed, on account of the number of hands that would be required, and the higher rate of wages. In several parts of the East Indies, the silk-worm has been introduced, as might have been expected, with complete success; and, in Bengal alone, the factories find employment for upwards of two hundred thousand persons. THE MANAGEMENT OF THE WORM. Silk is the production of a species of Moth, called the _Phalæna mori_ or Mulberry moth, and its original locality, as we have already stated, appears to have been China or Persia. The changes that butterflies or moths undergo, having already been described at page 212 of Vol. II., it will be needless to repeat them. The substance which the animal spins to protect itself when in the Pupa state, is the silk, which, before it is dyed or bleached, is of a bright yellow colour more or less inclining to orange. The Silk-worm in not the only creature that produces substances of this description, for many other kinds of butterflies and moths do the same; a kind of silk has also been manufactured from the webs of spiders, and as they require less attention than the Silk-worms, the plan might have answered, had it not been for the ravenous appetites of the little spinners, who, when brought together in any quantity very speedily devour each other. Certain shell-fish also produce a kind of silky thread; as, for instance, the muscle, but more particularly the _pinna_, a large kind of shell-fish found in the Mediterranean and other seas.