THE SATURDAY MAGAZINE.
No 65. JULY 6TH, 1833. Price One Penny.
UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE COMMITTEE OF GENERALLITERATURE AND EDUCATION, APPOINTED BY THE SOCIETY FOR PROMOTINGCHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE.
THE HISTORY AND CULTURE OF SILK.
The culture and manufacture of Silk, appearsoriginally to have been confined to the Empire ofChina, and even at the present time, no country producesthis useful material in such large quantities, orof so fine a description. When silk was first broughtinto Europe, so little was known of its origin, thatthe most absurd tales were told respecting it; bysome it was said to be a kind of fleece, whichadhered to the branches of trees; by others, the barkof the tree itself, and by another party, the productionof a flower.
The scarcity and consequent value of silk, whenit was first introduced at Rome, may be estimatedby the fact, that more than two hundred years afterthat time, the Emperor Aurelian refused his Empressa garment of this material, on account of its immenseprice, twelve ounces of gold being the chargefor one pound of Silk. It was not till the year 552,that the eggs of the insect, by which the silk is produced,were brought into Europe. Two monks employedas missionaries, had succeeded in penetratinginto the Chinese Empire, and having obtained a[Pg 2]thorough knowledge of the whole process of rearingthe silk-worm, and manufacturing the silk, they ontheir return, repaired to Constantinople, and gave anaccount of their enterprise to the Emperor Justinian.Induced by the offer of a great reward, they oncemore returned to China, and succeeded, after manyefforts, in eluding the vigilance of that suspiciouspeople, and bringing to Constantinople a number ofthe eggs of the silk-worm, concealed in the head of awalking-cane; these were hatched by the heat ofa hot-bed, and being afterwards carefully fed andattended to, the experiment, which had cost theseenterprising men so much toil, was perfectly successful,and the cultivation of the silk-worm becamevery general over the whole of Greece. In the year1146, we still find the management of these usefulcreatures, and the manufacture of their spoils, inEurope, confined to the Greek Empire.
In 947, Roger, the first King of Sicily, invadedGreece, and having sacked the cities of Athens,Thebes, and Corinth, led into captivity a considerablenumber of silk-weavers, whom he forcibly settled atPalermo, obliging them to instruct his subjects inthe art, and in twenty years, the Sicilian silks aresaid to have attained great excellence, from the varietyof patterns in which they were wrought. Themanufacture of this important article, graduallyspread through the whole of Italy and Spain, but itwas not until the beginning of the sixteenth century,in the reign of Francis the First, that it was introducedinto France. In 1554, while its manufacturewas yet but little known in England, a cu