I visited in the spring season I found that he had hatched fifty cards of “seed.”  From the birth of the caterpillars to the formation of cocoons the casualties must be reckoned at ten per cent. daily.  Not more than eighty-five per cent. of the cocoons which are produced are of good quality.  The remainder are misshapen or contain dead chrysalises.  As there are more than a thousand breeds of silk-worm, all cocoons are not of the same shape and colour.  Some are oval; some are shaped like a monkey nut.  Most are white but some are yellow and others yellow tinted.

In the whole world of stock raising there is nothing more remarkable than the birth of silk-worm moths.  The cocoons on the racks in the farmer’s loft are covered by sheets of newspaper in which a number of round holes about three-quarters of an inch in diameter have been cut.  When the moths emerge from their cocoons they seek these openings towards the light and creep through to the upper side of the newspaper.  For newly born things they come up through these openings with astonishing ardour.  In body and wings the moths are flour white.  White garments are suitable for the babe, the bride and the dead, and the moth perfected in the cocoon is arrayed not only for its birth but for bridal and death, which come upon it in swift succession.  The male as well as the female is in white and is distinguishable by being somewhat smaller in size.  On the newspaper the few males who have not found partners are executing wild dances, their wings whirring the while at a mad pace.  When from time to time they cease dancing they haunt the holes in the paper through which the newly born moths emerge.  When a female appears a male instantly rushes towards her, or rather the two creatures rush towards one another, and they are at once locked in a fast embrace.  Immediately their wings cease to flutter, the only commotion on the newspaper being made by the unmated males.  In a hatching-room these males on the stacks of trays are so numerous that the place is filled with the sound of the whirring of their wings.  The down flies from their wings to such an extent that one continually sneezes.  The spectacle of the stacks of trays covered by these ecstatic moths is remarkable, but still more remarkable is the thrilling sense of the power of the life-force in a supposedly low form of consciousness.

The wonder of the scene is missed, no doubt, by most of those who are habituated to it.  From time to time weary, stolid-looking girls or old women lift down the trays and run their hands over them in order to pick up superfluous male moths.  Sometimes the male moths are walking about the newspaper, sometimes they are torn callously from the embrace of their mates.  The fate of the male moths is to be flung into a basket where they stay until the next day, when perhaps some of them may be mated again.  The novice is impressed not only by the ruthlessness of this treatment but by the way in which the whole loft is littered by male moths which have fallen or have been flung on the floor and are being trampled on.