Page:The history of silk, cotton, linen, wool, and other fibrous substances 2.djvu/173



"Let us fancy that some thousand years ago, a mortal, wandering through an oriental wood, saw a worm falling from a fruit-bearing tree—that he found this little creature had reached the end of one of its stages of existence, and was laboriously engaged in shrouding itself in an unknown substance, like a fine thread of gold, out of which it constructed its tomb; that, attracted by the circumstance, he found this shroud to consist of a thread hundreds of yards long, which a very little attention enabled him to detach; he found he could strengthen the threads by uniting them together, and they could be applied to various purposes of usefulness; he thought of winding off the thread; the reel lends him the first assistance, but he could not make the reel without the co-operation of a knife, or some such instrument with a sharp edge. Thus the aid of art—of the produce of art—is already called in. With this rude instrument he makes a machine which enables him to reel off the thread coffin of the curious animal. In process of time, he finds that this fine filament can be applied to the making of garments—garments alike useful and ornamental. Now trace the progress of things by which, from the narrow sphere of his observation and experiment, his success spreads through the districts he inhabits, and from them to other lands, and becomes an object of importance to communicate with the whole family of man. By and by the cocoon, or its produce, finds its way to foreign countries, probably more enlightened than his own, again to be operated on by a higher intelligence and more practised skill. This associates the thread of the silk-worm with a ship, with ship-building, and all its marvellous combinations.—Some wandering merchant probably conveyed the raw material to Persia; some adventurous mariner to Greece or Italy, or other regions where it gave a new impulse to science and to thought. But consider for a moment, before the ship was launched upon the water, how many elements were necessary for its production; think of how multitudinous and various the materials which that ship required for its construction, before the products of that remote country are brought to their ultimate markets for manufacture. I refer to this particular topic, because it is associated with the prosperity of the districts in which we are, and I wished to carry back your thoughts to the germ whence that prosperity sprung."— Lecture at the Poplar Institution.