Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 10, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 November 1884 — Facts About Silkworms. [ARTICLE]

Facts About Silkworms.

The ideas of the ancients upon the subject of the origin of silk were very vague, some supposing it to be the entrails of a spider, which fattened for years upon paste, at length burst, bringing forth its silken treasure; others that it was spun by a hideous horned grub in hard nests of clay—ideas which were not dispelled till the sixth century, when the first silkworms reached Constantinople, introduced and cultivated, like many other by the wandering monks, from thence they were soon imported into Italy, which for a long period remained the headquarters Of the European silk trade, until Henry IV. of France, seeing that mulberry trees were as plentiful in his southern provinces as in Italy, introduced silk-worm culture with great Success. Kirkby mentions the following interesting extract from the Courier de Lyon, 1846, as showing the extraordinary quantity of silk there annually consumed at that period: “Raw silk annually consumed there 1,000,000 of kilogrammes, equal to 2,205,714 pounds English, on which the waste in manufacturing is 5 pei cent. As our cocoons produce one graine (grain) of silk, 4,000,000,000 of cocoons are annually consumed, making the number of caterpillars reared (including the average allowance for caterpillars dying, bad cocoons, and those kept for eggs ), 4,292,400,000. The length of the silk of one cocoon averages 500 meters (1,526 feet English), so that the lenght of the total quantity of silk spun in Lyons is 6,500,000,000,000 (or six and a half trillions) of English feet, equal to fourteen times the mean radius of the earth’s orbit, or 5,495 times the mean radius of the moon’s orbit, or 52,505 times the equatorial circumference of the earth, or 200,000 times the circumference of the moon.” —Land and Water.