SILK AND THE SILK INDUSTRY. In this it is proposed to trace briefly the his tory of the manufacture of silk, which has been throughout all the past an article of luxury, and which as late as the 3d century of our era commanded a price so great as to be beyond an emperor's wealth to purchase for his empress; but in our day has come to be within the means and ability of the great masses of our people, and a necessity instead of a luxury.
1. Chinese appear to be the first people who applied themselves to sericulture, although some claim for the Tussur silk of India the earliest silk fibre used. The words Seres used by Theophanes and Serinda by Pro copius were in all probability so used to indi cate that part of the East, which was no doubt China, where the silk industry existed at a very remote period. Ptolemy was the first to use the word Seres for China, or rather the north ern part of it, known later as Cathay; and the name is derived from the Chinese name of the silkworm, see, see or si, in Korean sir, whence the Greek OP, the silkworm; maw the people who furnished silk; and irripus6v silk. The Latin sericum has been traced direct to the Mongol Sirkeh; and the Serikoth of Isaiah, xix, 9, has been supposed to be silk. From serwum is derived the French soie, and etymo logically connected with it are the German seide, Anglo-Saxon seolc and English silk. informs us, in a Chinese work called the Silkworm Classic,' that Se-ling-shi, the principal queen of Hwang-te (2640 ac.), was the first to rear silkworms, and the Em peror Hwang-te was induced to make robes and garments from this circumstance. The Chinese historians carry back the cultivation of the mulberry and the breeding of silkworms to the mythic period. If they are to be be lieved, the art of silk-reeling was known in China in the time of Fouh-hi, a century before the date traditionally assigned to the biblical deluge, and Hwang-te's queen did not disdain to share in the labors attending the care of the insect, as well as in those of the loom, the in vention of which seems to be attributed to her and to have raised her to the position of a tute lary genius with special altars of her own. But whatever the precise date of the discovery, there can be no question of the very high an tiquity of the knowledge of the worm and its product in China. A series of imperial edicts and voluminous literature of practical treatises testify to the importance of the industry and the care that was taken to foster an art which was considered, according to M. de Rosny, °best fitted to promote the morality of the peo ple and extinguish pauperism in the empire.) The wives of the nobles through successive generations personally attended to the rearing of the silkworms. That this silk was of the mulberry-fed kind is evident from a further extract from the 'Silkworm Classic' which says that afterward Yu regulated the waters (2200 ac.) mention is made, in his work
on the tribute, of the land adapted for the mul berry tree having been supplied with silkworms, from which time the advantage thereof gradu ally increased? It is not known whether silk was utilized in India at so early a period as this; but that India learned the art from China is generally believed, although at what period is not known. Aristotle is the first Occidental to give a description of the silkworm, speaking of it as a horned insect, which passed through successive transformations and produced born bykia. Four hundred years later Pliny described the silkworm, but he knew nothing of its con nection with the production of silk, which, he affirmed, was a woolly substance, combed from the leaves of trees and spun by the Seres. For 1,200 or 1,500 years after silk fabrics had become known in western Asia and eastern Europe, the prevalent opinion was, that it was either a fleece which grew upon a tree (thus confounding it with cotton), or the fibre from the inner bark of sonic tree or shrub; while some, deceived by the glossy and silky fibres of the seed vessels of the Asclepius Syriaca (milk-week), and of the silk-cotton tree (Bom bax) believed it was the product of one or the other of these. A few had come so near the truth as to conjecture that it was spun by a spider or beetle. So carefully did the Orientals keep their secret that it was not exposed until the 6th century after Christ, when two Nesto rian monks, who had been engaged in missionary labors in China, solved the mystery, by bring ing to Constantinople a small quantity of silk worm eggs, concealed in the hollow of their palmer staves. The missionaries had observed in China the various processes connected with the rearing of silkworms, the nature of the trees on which they fed, and the preparation of the silk. This occurred in 552 in the reign of Justinian, who gave every encouragement to the introduction of the valuable insect. At the proper season the eggs were hatched and 'the caterpillars were fed on the leaves of the wild mulberry tree. The monks continued to super intend at Constantinople the rearing of the insects and the whole process of manufacturing the silk. This knowledge, thus made public, soon spread over the world and though the vast production of silk by the Chinese was not diminished, that of Europe and western Asia was greatly developed in the centuries that followed. Before the introduction of the silk worm in the West and while its culture still remained a Chinese secret the cities of Greece and Syria were compelled to pay so high a price for silk that their fabrics were sold ounce for ounce for their weight in gold.