Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/521

Rh You know so well how our silk-worms are cultivated that I need not relate the details of the method. In principle there is not much difference between our method and yours; possibly yours is only a copy of ours, without pretending to possess any novel features. But our system goes back to twenty-seven hundred years before Christ. The queen of the Emperor Hoang-Ti at that time first conceived the idea of raising silk-worms and of making from their production garments with which to clothe the people over whom her august husband ruled.

The invention had such a following that it is still spreading through the whole world on a growing scale. Notwithstanding we have the wool and fur of animals, silk still is and always will be an article of luxury that no one who has the means of getting it will do without. We, who are always grateful to our benefactors, honor the inventor of the art of silk-culture with a real perpetual cult. Besides the temples which we have erected in all the corners of the empire, her Majesty the Empress goes every year at the hatching season, in person, with all her suite, and in great pomp, to the field of the mulberry, to sacrifice to the goddess who was the queen of the Emperor Hoang-Ti. After the