ALDHELMUS, CL., A. D. 680.
This author, who died Abbot of Sherburn, was among the most learned men of his age. In his Ænigmas, which are written in tetrastics, we find the following description of the silk-worm. As it is scarcely possible that he could have seen this creature, we have cause to admire both the ingenuity and general accuracy of his lines. The ascending to the tops of thorns or shrubs, such as "genistæ," to which the animal may attach its cocoon (globulum), has not been noticed by any earlier author.
De Bombycibus.
Annua dum redeunt texendi tempora telas,
Lurida setigeris replentur viscera filis;
Moxque genistarum frondosa cacumina scando,
Ut globulus fabricans cum fati sorte quiescam.
Maxima Bibl. Vet. Patrum, tom. xiii. p. 25.
Soon as the year brings round the time to spin,
My entrails dark with hairy threads are fill'd:
Then to the leafy lops of shrubs I climb,
Make my cocoon, and rest by fate's decree.
In a book written by this author, in praise of virginity, he observes, That chastity alone did not form an amiable and perfect character, but required to be accompanied and adorned by many other virtues; and this observation he further illustrates by the following simile taken from the art of weaving: "As it is not a web of one uniform color and texture, without any variety of figures, that pleaseth the eye and appears beautiful, but one that is woven by shuttles, filled with threads of purple, and many other colors, flying from side to side, and forming a variety of figures and images, in different compartments, with admirable art."—Bibliotheca Patrum, tom. xiii.
- [Footnote: John Lateran at Rome, and both of these are described by Spon in his Miscellanea
Eruditæ Antiquitatus (p. 284.); II. in the figure of Charles the Bald, the grandson of Charlemagne, which is in the splendid copy of the Latin Gospels made for his use, now preserved in the library at Munich, and which may be seen engraved in Sanft's Dissertation on that MS. (p. 42.); III. in the figure of an early French king engraved from a MS. by Baluzius in his Capitularia Regum Francorum (tom. ii. p. 1308.); and IV. in the first volume of Montfaucon's Monumens de la Monarchie Française.]
