The culture of the ricinus silkworm in Australia
(and also at the Cape of Good Hope) is at
least worth a thought; both the insect and the
plant are settlers from an older country.
Respecting the native caterpillar on the native
gum–tree, we are less sanguine in our expectations;
for no better reason, however, than that
—without saying that no good indigenous thing
can come out of Australia—the probabilities
are much against it. It is even remarkable
that so wide an area, so favourably situated in
respect to latitude, should have yielded so few
useful novelties to its discoverers. As Ophir
furnished gold and peacocks, so Australia sends
us gold and cockatoos, with love–birds and
parroquets of her own, but hardly a fruit or a
vegetable fit to appear on a European table. Even
a superior variety of mushroom is probably of
foreign origin. From its neighbourhood we get
little more than that very poor affair, New
Zealand spinach. Very few of its ornamental plants
and shrubs will bear the out–door climate of
Northern and Central Europe. "Botany Bays,"
as gardeners used to call Australian plants, are
upon the list of gardeners' plagues.

On the other hand, the natural productions
of China and Japan appear to be endowed with
an innate compatibility for the climate of the
United Kingdom. The list of introductions
from those regions which have thriven from the
first with us, instead of being nearly null and
void, as is the case with the Australian group,
is most voluminous. It includes garden vegetables,
flowering plants, shrubs, trees, deciduous
and evergreen, beasts, birds, fishes, and insects.
Every year is adding to our stock from those
quarters; it will be extraordinary if our victorious
mission in China do not bring back some
useful and agreeable additions which will prove
as thrifty with us as they are at home. Look
at what has been done by one person alone,
Robert Fortune, who will be one of the first to
declare how much organic treasure still remains to
be gathered. In short, if an untried plant or
living creature is known to come from Northern
China or Japan, there is a strong presumption
in its favour that it will turn out an acquisition
to Great Britain, Ireland, France, and Italy.
From that home have been made to emigrate
both the ailanthus–tree and the silkworm which
it supports.

Another correspondent requests to be put in
the way of obtaining a small supply of the new
silkworms' eggs, by being placed in communication
with the persons who rear them. But it
must be clear that no contributor to this journal
—however willing to oblige, as the present
writer is—can undertake to execute commissions,
nor even to answer letters privately. If
only one tenth of the readers of an article which
excited people's interest were individually to
address its author, expecting an individual
reply, the tax of time and postage stamps would
be so heavy as to render periodical literature a
losing speculation. In respect to both the eggs
and the ready hatched silkworms, it will happen
with them as with other marketable articles—a
demand will create a supply. According to the
natural course of things, they will be obtainable
for money. There are numerous persons in
London and elsewhere who deal in live
creatures for the stocking of zoological gardens,
menageries, aviaries, aquariums, and private
apartments, who will supply you with anything,
from lions and tigers to toads and frogs; and it
is more than likely that the bombyx of the
ailanthus will be to be bought in Covent Garden
Market during the coming summer. The rearing
of a few of these useful insects would be
quite as amusing, and may, perhaps, become as
fashionable, as the tending a useless, though
instructive and interesting, aquarium. But there
should be no disputing about tastes, especially
as one does not interfere with the other. What
intending amateurs must do at once is to plant,
as soon as the frost will allow, young ailanthus–
trees in proportion to their projects.

If the London Zoological Society intends
rearing a colony of the silkworms, their distribution
will be greatly facilitated. At present, a
large stock of eggs would be in the hands of the
society who have founded the Jardin Zoologique
d'Acclimatation, in the Bois de Boulogne,
Paris; such eggs would be at the disposal of
Monsieur Guérin–Méneville, as would also be
the produce from the Emperor's five thousand
ailanthuses in La Sologne. Madame La
Comtesse Drouyn de Lhuys ought also to be
possessed of a considerable quantity of eggs.

In the course of last December the writer
visited the Acclimatising Garden in the Bois de
Boulogne, with a view to the interests of this
journal. The French scientific journals and
the feuilletons of the newspapers had announced
its opening as if it were complete and in working
order: but it turned out to be as yet a very
unfinished and half–empty shell. Immediately
to the left, on entering, there is a hothouse, or
greenhouse, to which you are not admitted;
but it is probably not for show at all, but
merely a propagating house for the increase of
plants to fill up beds and corners that are
gaping wide to receive them. There is an
aquarium, which will be charming when the
tanks are filled with water and fish; there are
paddocks, stables, huts, kennels, only waiting
for their occupants. It must be laid to the
fault of the weather that, of those occupied,
many of the tenants were invisible; whilst in
others, a melancholy ostrich or a moping stag
peeped sadly at you over a half–door, or through
an open wicket, being prevented by their considerate
keepers from running out in the rain and
catching cold.

The garden was founded on the principle
that (although very happy to receive strangers
at a franc, and their carriages at three francs
admission each) it is not to be a mere show or
menagerie open to the public, like our Regent's
Park Garden; nor is it to embrace the whole
of scientific zoology, like the Jardin des Plantes,
with its attached museums and schools of
comparative anatomy; but is to confine its
operations to the introduction of living creatures