God’s Creation and Man’s Invention.
~WHERE DOES SILK COME FROM?~
Silk in its finished state is an ideal product. It is at once durable,
magnificent to the eye, tender to the touch, and its rustle is soft
music to the ear. Hence it is easy to understand why the silkworm,
from the earliest times, has been an object of much consideration and
concern from a commercial and industrial point of view. In this country
alone, we annually expend as much for silk goods as we do for public
education and thirty times as much as we do for foreign missions. Such
an indomitable producer of wealth is the silkworm, and a producer of
wealth it has been from an age as remote as when Joseph was down in old
Egypt, interpreting the dreams of King Pharaoh’s butler and baker and
later that of the King himself.
To-day we speak of twenty centuries, and our minds can hardly
comprehend such a lapse of time. What shall we think of the silkworm,
that for twice twenty centuries has furnished practically all the
raw material for the world’s silk supply? Because man’s ingenuity is
at present actively engaged in the attempt to displace it by cheaper
substitutes, the thought has come to us that, without going too
minutely into mechanical processes, a good opportunity is presented
to give some interesting information in regard to the silkworm as
the creation of the Divine Hand, in contrast to the silkworm as the
creation of man.
According to Chinese authority, the use of silk dates from 2650 B.C.,
and it is generally conceded that, in point of age, it stands midway
among the great textiles, wool and cotton having preceded it, while
flax, hemp and other fibrous plants followed shortly in its train.
The first patron of the silkworm was Hoang-Ti, Third Emperor of China,
and his Empress, Si-Ling-Chi, was the first practical silkworm breeder
and silk reeler. It is related of her that she was once walking in the
palace gardens when she discovered a strange and repulsive looking
worm. It was small, of a pale green color, and was feeding greedily on
a mulberry leaf. She interested the Emperor in this strange creature,
and, at the Emperor’s suggestion, took the fine silken web which the
worm finally spun, and was the first to successfully reel the new
filament and weave it into cloth. So beneficial to the nation was her
work considered that her gratified subjects bestowed upon her the
divine title of “Goddess of the Silkworms,” and to this day the Chinese
celebrate in her honor the “Con-Con Feast,” which takes place during
the season in which the silkworm eggs are hatched.
In accounting for the presence of silkworms in the garden of this
early empress, we can rightly conclude that certain parts of China
have always abounded in forests of mulberry trees, and that the worms
themselves had existed in great numbers in a wild state and attached
their cocoons to the trees for ages before any use was discovered
for their web. In fact, such wild silkworms not only abound in China
to-day, but have also been found in Southern and Eastern Asia,
inhabiting the jungles of India, Pegu, Siam and Cochin China, but the
cocoons of these worms are, naturally, of a very inferior quality, and
are only used for the crudest kind of work.
[Illustration:
Illustration by courtesy The Brainerd & Armstrong Silk Co.