Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/692

674 they have to live and cultivate their ground. In this business the profits melt away rapidly, and particularly where the mulberry was the only crop, as at Cévennes, misery has taken the place of comfort. Those who once called themselves rich are to-day scarcely able to get food to eat. Those who used to hire day-laborers to gather their harvest have become day-laborers, and the laborers of former times have emigrated. This will give you an idea of the extremities to which they are reduced, for to uproot a mountaineer of Cévennes he must be dying of hunger.

To escape a fatality so heavy, these people have displayed perseverance and courage of the highest kind. They have undertaken distant journeys to get non-infected eggs. More than one has not come back from these journeys, where it was needful to struggle against great fatigue in inhospitable countries. Although they fell not on a field of battle, struck by ball or bullet, they were true soldiers; and, although they did not carry arms, they died in the service of the country.

During seventeen years this exhaustion has been most aggravated in places chiefly devoted to sericulture. But, if these local sufferings merit all our sympathy, their general consequences still more demand our attention. Confidence in the culture of the silk-worm has diminished wherever it was not the exclusive occupation. Where other crops could replace it, that of the mulberry was easily discouraged. In many countries they have destroyed the tree so lately known as the tree of gold.

As the foregoing interesting discourse was delivered in 1866, the following statement of Prof. Huxley regarding the pébrine malady, made in 1870, in his address before the British Association, will be interesting.—[