Handbook of the collection illustrative of the wild silks of India : in the Indian section of the South Kensington Museum, with a catalogue of the collection and numerous illustrations / by Thomas Wardle.

  • Wardle, Thomas, Sir, 1831-1909.
Date:
1881
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Handbook of the collection illustrative of the wild silks of India : in the Indian section of the South Kensington Museum, with a catalogue of the collection and numerous illustrations / by Thomas Wardle. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    34/186 (page 18)
    Dheemurs carefully abstain from flesh, fish, or haldi as their food, nor do they cut their hair or shave, and carefully deny themselves all ablution. When the cocoons are formed they are collected into a heap, and a goat, pig, or fowl is sacrificed to Mahadeo in his form Jogni; the blood is sprinkled over the cocoons, and, after a bout of liquor, are taken home. On the third day following the Dheemurs shave and resume their normal condition.*’^ The caterpillars moult five times, at intervals of from five to eight days. When first hatched they weigh but ~ of a grain, and are about ^ of an inch long; but at the end of their larval existence, which is from forty to forty-five days, they have attained a size of seven inches long, one inch in diameter, and weigh about 370 grains (Plate III.) They then begin to spin their cocoons, which are of an egg shape and silvery drab in colour (Plate IV., Fig. 1). The silk is all regularly deposited in a compact manner, resem- bling in substance the shell of an egg (Plate IV., Fig. 2). The cocoons vary much in size. The largest I have seen are from Sambulpoor, and are two inches long and 1\ inches in diameter. The weight of the large cocoons is, without the pupa and supporting pedicle, 28 grains ; the ordinary size 16 grains. Mr. H. Meyer, of Milan, has reeled for me an unbroken double thread from one cocoon, which weighs 12 grains, and measures 1,332 yards, or a little more than three quarters of a mile. Major Coussmaker remarks t:— cc As a rule, there are certainly two crops in the year; the moths of the first batch come out in about four or six weeks after the first lot of worms (which come out at the commencement of the rains) have spun ; those of the second batch remain quiescent until the rains begin again, that is to say, until May. As this entails the chrysalis remaining in the cocoon as long as eight months, exposed to the hottest sun and occasional thunderstorms, the cocoon had need to be made a hard impenetrable material; so inde- structible is it, that Blieels and and other tribes which live in the jungles use the cocoon as an extinguisher to the bamboo tube in which they keep the “falita” or cotton- rope tinder used by them for lighting their tobacco and the slow matches of their matchlocks. The cocoon is also cut into a long spiral band, and used for binding the barrel of matchlocks to the stocks, being, as the natives say, un- * Captain Brooke, as quoted in Geoghegan, “ Silk Industry of India, ” p. 110. f “The Tusser Silkworm,” p. 9, 1873.