From what has been here brought forward, it will be seen that of silk, whence it came or what was its kind, nothing was truly understood, even by the learned, for many ages. While, then, we smile at Virgil and the other ancients for thinking that silk was a sort of herbaceous fleece growing upon trees, let us not forget that not so many years ago our own Royal Society printed a paper in which it is set forth that the yet-called Barnacle Goose comes from a mussel-like bivalve shell, known as the "Anatifa," or Barnacle, an origin for the bird still believed in by some of our seafaring folks, and fostered after a manner by well-read people by the scientific nomenclature of the shell and the vernacular epithet for the goose. In the twelfth century, our countryman, Alexander Neckham, foster-brother to our Richard I., wrote of this marvel thus: "Ex lignis abiegnis salo diuturno tempore madefactis originem sumit avis quæ vulgo dicitur bernekke," &c.[1] Such, however, was the Cirencester Augustinian friar's knowledge of natural history, that, at least four hundred years ere the Royal Society had a being amongst us, he thus spurns the popular belief upon the subject:—
Ligna novas abiegna salo madefacta, jubente
Natura, volucres edere fama refert.
Id viscosus agit humor, quod publica fama
Afserit indignans philosophia negat.[2]
Of a truth the Record Commission is doing England good service by drawing out of darkness the works of our mediæval writers.
The breeding of the worm and the manufacture of its silk both spread themselves with steady though slow steps over most of those countries which skirt the shores of the Mediterranean; so that, by the tenth century, those processes had reached from the far east to the uttermost western limits of that same sea. Even then, and a long time after, the natural history of the silkworm became known but to a very few. Our aforesaid countryman, Alexander Neckham, made Abbot of Cirencester, A.D. 1213, was, it is likely, the first who, while he had learned, tried in his popular work, "De Natura Rerum," to help others to understand the habits of the insect: "Materiam vestium sericarum contexit vermis qui bombex dicitur. Foliis celsi, quæ vulgo morus dicitur, vescitur, et materiam serici digerit; postquam vero operari cœperit, escam renuit, labori delicioso diligentem operam impendens. Calathi parietes industrius textor circuit, lanam educens crocei coloris quæ nivei candoris efficitur per ablutionem, antequam tinctura artificialis superinduitur. Consummato
