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

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The area of the jungle forest in the Santhal country, in which grow the trees whose leaves form the best food of these silkworms, is vast beyond any probable use which the most enterprising silk-grower conceives. “As far as the eye could reach from any rising ground,” writes Mr. Thomas Wardle, in his History of the Growth of the Tussur Silk Industry, “and for hundreds of square miles, there lay a forest in which it seemed that any quantity of the tussur of the future might be cultivated, and I think it is worthy of the attention of the Government of India to encourage in every way a greatly increased production, and not to be behind China in this respect, remembering that when I showed how tussur-silk could be used, the demand which sprang up was chiefly met by the greater quickness of the Chinese.”

Not only the moths, but even the caterpillars, or larvæ of the various silk-moths, are as beautiful as any fabric which is woven from the glossy fibres of their cocoons. Let no one despise “worms and creeping things” after once seeing these exquisitely formed and coloured creatures. The larvæ of most may be seen in late July in the Insect House, feeding on green leaves in the cases. The finest are those of the Cecropian silk-moth; they are of a blue-green, with a soft bloom like that on some succulent plant. The whole body is clothed with alternate lines of turquoise and amber studs, specked with black, polished and shining like jewels. Those that have spun their cocoons are wrapped in jackets of light-brown silk, into which strips of green leaves of the plum-tree are twisted for protection. The Ailanthus silk-moth has a pale-grey larva, with little ornaments in rows, shaped like the flowers of the stone-crop, and dotted with black. The moth itself is strangely beautiful, fawn-coloured, with bold wavy lines of black, grey, and pink. The Promethean silk-moth has a larva of pale Cambridge blue, with yellow and crimson studs. Not even the sea anemones in their native waters are more beautiful than these fugitive forms assumed by the undeveloped silk-moths of the East.