are a disgrace to the country? It would surely
be better to give up a little of our great and
glorious expenditure, than to support it by
squeezing five-and-forty shillings a year from
those who are dying of hunger.

OUR LITTLE FRIENDS.

WE may not be accustomed to hear grubs and
animalcules called domestic animals. But, asks
Doctor T. L. Phipson, "do we not rear our
silkworms with as much care as our sheep or our
cows? Do we not construct houses for our
bees, cochineals, snails, oysters, as we do
for our rabbits, our chickens, or our horses?
Are not large fortunes realised by the cultivation
of a worm such as the leech, or a grub such as
the silkworm, as readily as by the aid of the camel
of the desert, or the Indian elephant? Have
we not seen a thimbleful of some new insect or
its eggs fetch as high a price in the market as
the choicest Cochin-China fowl?"

We always ought to cultivate our friends, and
that these little friends, which are remarkably
well worth cultivating, are not cultivated half
enough, and how much we lose by our neglect,
Dr. Phipson suggests in a little book on the
Utilisation of Minute Life, designed to improve
our acquaintance with our smallest fellow-
creatures. A man is likely to thrive if he can
discover "a means of doubling the produce of
the bee or the silkworm, or a method by which
sponges and corals might be cultivated with as
much ease as a lettuce or a cauliflower." So
says Dr. Phipson, and what sort of information
it is that he wishes to diffuse, his book enables
us to show. He includes in his register
crustacea, molluscs, worms, polyps, infusoria,
sponges. We content ourselves with notes on
our friends of the insect world.

There are more kinds of silkworm than the
mulberry-worm common in Europe, which spins
at the rate of six inches a minute, and in Lyons
spins six million million feet of silk every year.
Fifteen hundred English feet is the average
length of one cocoon; the average crop from one
ounce weight of eggs is eighty pounds weight of
cocoon, and one pound weight of the cocoon will
yield an ounce of eggs, but the harvest is
sometimes greater. The ounce of egg, or seed, has
been known to make one hundred and thirty
pounds of cocoon.

In India, use has been made of a Tussah silkworm
which feeds on the leaves of the jujube-
tree, but will eat other leaves, and has even
been reared experimentally on oak-leaves, a fact
encouraging to those who propose its introduction
into Europe. Its silk is much coarser than
that of the common silkworm, and of a darker
colour. It clothes one hundred and twenty
millions of Asiatics, and clothes made of it will
last, for constant use, ten or eleven years.
Another Asiatic moth yielding this kind of silk
will feed also on oak. Its eggs have been known
to hatch in Siberia before there were leaves on
the oak-tree, and the larvæ have then been saved
from starving by oak-branches placed in vessels
of water to force the buds to open quickly.
The Oriady silkworm, discovered in Bengal, feeds
on the castor-oil plant, and yields soft and glossy
silk that cannot be wound off the cocoon. It is
woven, therefore, into a coarse loose textured
fabric used for clothing and for packing costly
goods. It is so durable that a garment of it cannot
be worn out during a man's lifetime.

Can the silkworms be made to produce their
goods ready dyed? The solution of this question
has been attempted by sprinkling over the
mulberry leaves on which the worms feed such
innocent colouring matter as indigo, or the fine
red dye of a Bignonia called chica, wherewith
the Indians of Oronoco dye their skin. M.
Roulin is the great French experimenter in this
way. He is still at work, but hitherto, though
he has been able to get dyed silk, he has not
been able to get it well dyed.

There is a clothes moth called the Pinea
padilla, of which each larva spins about half a
square inch of fine silk, and a great number of
these larvae being set to work on the surface of
a paper model, the parts which they were not
to cover with silk being oiled, Mr. Habenstreet
has caused the clothes moth to produce an air
balloon about four feet high; one or two shawls,
and a complete seamless dress with sleeves, not
only the material, but the dress itself being
made by the clothes moth. The Queen of
Bavaria is said once to have worn such a robe of
gauzy silk over her court costume. It is light
to a fault, for the slightest breath of wind is
enough to carry a whole dress away. Dresses
have been made of silk from the yellow cocoon
of a Paraguay spider. A peculiar white silk is
yielded by the Ichneumon fly of the West
Indies, but no use has yet been made of it.

The silk dress that one insect makes, another
can dye magnificently. The insect called kermes
or chermes, nearly related to the cochineal, and
used for dyeing before cochineal was known,
gives its name to the colour that the French
call cramoisi and the English crimson. In the
middle ages the insect was supposed to be
produced from a worm, and was described as
vermiculatum, whence comes the name in French
of vermeil and in English of vermilion. Kermes
is found in many parts of Asia, and in the south
of Europe, and is very common in the south of
France, where it lives on a small evergreen oak.
Another kind of it, known also before the cochineal
or coccus of the cactus, is common in
Poland and Russia, and has been an important
article of commerce under the name of the
"scarlet grain of Poland." It is found in
England on the roots of the perennial knarvel, a
plant not uncommon in Norfolk and Suffolk.

Our cochineal was found to be already in use
in its native Mexico when, early in the
sixteenth century, the Spaniards arrived there;
but for a hundred years men were not sure
whether it was an insect or a seed. The cactus
on which it is usually bred is called the
nopal, whence the plantations are known as
nopaleries, and the chief part of the cochineal