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666 invention. This date carries us back 5,265 years. They are said to have employed the silk of wild caterpillars, and to have spun a sort of floss. At that time they knew nothing of raising the worm or of winding the cocoon into skeins.

This double industry appears to have arisen 2,650 years before our era, or 4,515 years ago, through the efforts of an empress named Si-ling-Chi. To her is attributed the invention of silk stuffs. You will not be surprised to see that the fabrication of silks should have a woman as its inventor.

Si-ling-Chi, in creating this industry, which was to be so immensely developed, enriched her country. Her countrymen seem to have understood the extent of the benefit, and to have been not ungrateful. They placed her among their deities, under the name of Sein-Thsan, two words that, according to M. Stanislas Julien, signify the first who raised the silk-worm. And still, in our time, the empresses of China, with their maids-of-honor, on an appointed day, offer solemn sacrifices to Sien-Thsan. They lay aside their brilliant dress, renounce their sewing, their embroidery, and their habitual work, and devote themselves to raising the silk-worm. In their sphere they imitate the Emperor of China, who, on his part, descends once a year from his throne to trace a furrow with the plough.

The Chinese are an eminently practical race. No sooner did they understand that silk would be to them a source of wealth, than they strove to obtain a monopoly of it. They established guards along their frontier—true custom-house officers—with orders to prevent the going out of seeds of the mulberry or of the silk-worm. Death was pronounced against him who attempted to transport from the country these precious elements which enriched the empire. So, during more than twenty centuries, we were completely ignorant of the source of these marvellous goods—the brilliant tissues manufactured from silk. For a long time we believed them to be a sort of cotton; some supposed even that they were gathered in the fields, and were the webs of certain gigantic spiders. The price of silk continued so high that the Emperor Aurelian, after his victories in the Orient, refused his wife a silken robe, as being an object of immoderate luxury, even for a Roman empress.

A monopoly founded on a secret ought necessarily to come to an end, particularly when the secret is known by several millions of men. But, to export the industry of Si-ling-Chi, it was needful to risk life in deceiving the custom-house officer. It was a woman who undertook this fine contraband stroke. Toward the year 140 before our era, a princess of the dynasty of Han, affianced to a King of Khokan, learned that the country in which she was destined to live had neither the mulberry nor the silk-worm. To renounce the worship of Sein-Thsan, and doubtless also to do without the beautiful stuffs, so dear to the coquette, appeared to her impossible. So she did not hesitate to use