SILKWORMS AND ‟AILANTHUS SILKWORMS.”
IN THE LAST NUMBER of the Lady’s Journal ‟Shamrock” writes for information relative to silkworms. My advice to ‟Shamrock” is to leave them alone. They have been tried over and over again, and the long and short of the matter is, that they will not do; and they have had a good long trial. In a late number of Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal is a curious bit of information as to how they were first brought over —one of the earliest and most sagacious bits of acclimatisation under difficulties I know of. The silkworm—we read—was introduced into Europe in the hollow of a pilgrim's staff.
‟Two monks, who resided in China as missionaries, imagined that in the eggs a numerous progeny might be preserved and propagated. Having acquainted the Roman Emperor at Constantinople with their designs, they travelled back to China, and by concealing the eggs of the silkworm in a hollow cane, deceived a people ever jealous of its commerce, and returned in triumph to Constantinople with the spoils of the East, having made a greater conquest than either Justinian or his celebrated general Belisarius had ever achieved.”
When my father was Canon of Christ Church, Oxford, he used to encourage his children in experiments with silkworms. In the centre of the garden stood a fine old mulberry-tree of apparent great age, and certainly of venerable aspect. I now think the age of this tree must be about that of James I., 1603, because I have lately learnt he was the first to bring mulberry-trees into England, with the idea of cultivating the worm which feeds on it. He was very eager on the subject, and distributed the young plants all over the country at charging a very moderate price for them. Who was the canon of Christ Church at this date living in the house at Christ Church I know not, but I should think it more than probable that he, or whoever planted the tree, thought it of great importance, for he has placed it in the centre and best part of the garden. The poor old tree has several bandages of lead and iron around his gouty limbs; but he still, I believe, even in his old age, gives out a famous crop of leaves and delicious mulberries, each in their due season. If the reader of this knows of a mulberry tree in his or her neighbourhood, I should feel obliged if they would examine it, and report as to its probable age. It is curious as well as gratifying that the promoters of acclimatisation of the present day should have had a royal patron so long ago as 1603. To King James I., therefore, let all the credit of the introduction of the mulberry tree be given. King James did his best to introduce silk into this country; but he got the wrong species of silkworm. If he had obtained the ‟Ailanthus” silkworm, I believe it would by this time have been quite acclimatised, and the manufacture of British silk an acknowledged fact. This is a silk-making worm (Bombyx Synthia), called Ailanthus, because it feeds on the leaves of the tree of that name. Europe is indebted for this silkworm to the Abbé Fantoni, a missionary in the province of Hang Tung, China, who sent some living cocoons to friends in Turin in 1856. He told his friends that the Chinese fed them with the leaf of a tree, something like an Acacia. They tried the worm with the leaves of the ‟Ailanthus glandulosa,” which they were found to eat gradually, nay more, get fat upon. There is no common or homely name for the Ailanthus tree; but it is very abundant in England, and will live anywhere, especially delighting in poor and steril soil; and where it lives, the worms will live also. I have seen these trees growing in many squares in London; and in Belgrave and St. James’s-squares there are several fine trees waiting impatiently to have the leaves pulled off for the benefit of the new worm, which is named after it. Could the Ailanthus worm be introduced into this country it would become a considerable and inexpensive source of profit to many poor villagers and others. I recommend the idea strongly to clergymen and their ladies.
Now our French neighbours have had the best of us in this matter: they have cultivated the worm with great success. We English people, however, have done nothing. There is, however, one far-sighted and intellectual lady who has seen the utility of this worm—need I mention that Lady Dorethy Neville is the great patroness of this silk-worm in Great Britain. During the last autumn, being very anxious to see the actual and practical cultivation of this silkworm, I asked her Ladyship to allow me to call on her. At her country residence at Dangstein, near Petersfield, Hants, her Ladyship has set apart a portion of her beautiful and well-ordered garden, and has planted it with the young Ailanthus trees, covering them over with a light canvass-made building, a precaution rendered necessary by the birds, who pick off the young worms. On entering this building, I saw, for the first time, the living worms; they were in the highest state of perfection, and really beautiful things to look at; not white-faced, pale-looking things like the common silkworm, but magnificent fellows from 2½ to 3 inches long, of an intense emerald-green colour, with the tubercles tipped with a gorgeous marine-blue. The manufacturer who could imitate this splendid specimen of Nature’s painting in silks for dresses for the ladies would make his fortune very soon.
Her Ladyship pointed out to me how the silkworms held on to the leaves; they cared nothing for rain, less for the wind. Their feet have greater adhesive powers than the suckers of the cuttle-fish, and their bodies are covered with a fine down which turns the rain drops, like the tiny hairs on the leaf of the cabbage. Many of them had made their cocoons—picking out snug, quiet corners—and were working away like diligent and useful weavers, as they are. Lady D. Neville explained how readily and at what little expense they were cultivated, and that she had found a ready market for all the cocoons she could grow, a gentleman in Paris having offered to take all she could supply for French manufacture. So highly, indeed, does the council of the English Acclimatisation Society think of Lady D. Neville’s painstaking and trouble in the matter, that they, a few days since, selected her name as one of the first of their members worthy of the medal of the French Acclimatisation Society. I regret, however, that the medal was not actually awarded to her Ladyship, not because her efforts were not highly appreciated in France, but because the number of medals for the Ailanthus silkworm had already been disposed of among the members of their own body in France.
But there is another lady who has taken up the subject of the Ailanthus silkworm. On Tuesday last I submitted to a meeting of the Zoological Society some exceedingly beautiful specimens of the Ailanthus silk in its stages, presented by Madame La Contesse de Cornellan, a lady who has made the subject her incessant study (and to whom we must wish all luck, in her undertaking), for to her most assuredly much credit is due.
I have made a request to this lady to be kind enough to write a chapter or two for the Lady’s Journal, giving the results of her experiments on the subject. She has kindly promised to do this; I shall, therefore, myself say no more on the subject, but leave it in better hands.
FRANK T. BUCKLAND (2nd Life Guards.)