Читать книгу Life at the Zoo: Notes and Traditions of the Regent's Park Gardens онлайн

16 страница из 49

Perhaps the most brightly coloured moths which are raised in the house are the Eacles regalis, which are covered with a net-work of orange, rivalling in colour the inner flesh of a melon, on a ground of greenish-grey; and the Eacles imperialis, in which an exquisite shade of “old rose” invades and is lost in a rich cream-coloured ground.

Not the least beautiful among the giant moths is the splendid creature from the cocoons of which the wild silks of India are wound. This is a far larger and finer moth than that which produces the Chinese tussur-silk. Its wings are “old gold” in colour, with two large transparent eyes on each, fringed with rose-colour. These, according to Hindoo superstition, are the finger-marks of the god Vishnu, and the Tussur moth is, therefore, sacred to that deity. But it is among the wild demon-worshipping Santhals that the Indian silk-moth has its native home. In the boundless upland forests, the trees on which it feeds are covered with thousands of the cocoons, which are gathered by these wild tribes, and sold to the silk-winders of the plains. Numbers of these fine cocoons line the cases at the Zoo, each with living pupa inside. The cocoons are beautiful objects in themselves, nearly the size of a walnut in the rind, and hanging by stalks firmly twisted to the supporting twigs, like rows of melons. Their colour varies through all shades of silvery or purplish-grey, streaked all over, like the eggs of the yellow-hammer, with fine irregular dark-purple lines. The silk threads of which they are woven are flat, like tape, not round, like the ordinary floss-silk of Europe; and it is to this flat and irregular form of the thread that the beauty of woven tussur-silk is mainly due. It may be doubted whether the cultivation of the Tussur moth will spread to the West, like that of the common “silkworm.” But the time is not far distant when this, and probably others of the fifty-nine species of silk-producing larvæ which were exhibited in the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, will become an additional source of wealth in the wide forest-regions of our Indian Empire.