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Of one large moth, Aristotle gives us an account which has been a puzzle to many. This begins as a great grub or caterpillar, with (as it were) horns; and, growing by easy stages, it spins at length a cocoon. There is a class of women who unwind and reel off the cocoons, and afterwards weave a fabric with the thread; and a certain woman of Cos is credited with the invention of this fabric. This is, at first sight, a plain and straightforward description of the silkworm; but we know that it was not till long afterwards, nearly a thousand years after, in Justinian's reign, that the silkworm and the mulberry-tree which is its food were brought out of the East into Byzantine Greece. We learn something of this Coan silkworm from Pliny, who tells us that it lived on the ash and oak and cypress tree; and from Clement of Alexandria and other of the Fathers we glean a little more—for instance, that the larva was covered with thick-set hairs, and that the cocoon was of a loose material something like a spider's web. All this agrees in every particular with a certain large moth (Lasiocampa otus), which spins a rough cocoon not unlike that of our Emperor moth, and lives in south-eastern Europe, feeding on the cypress and the oak. Many other silkworms besides the true or common one are still employed, worms which yield the Tussore silks of India and other kindred silks in Japan; and so likewise was this rough silky fabric spun and woven in Hellas, until in course of time it was surpassed and superseded by the finer produce of the 'Seric worm', and the older industry died out and was utterly forgotten.

Ere we leave the subject of insects let us linger a moment over one which the Greeks loved, and loved most of all. When as schoolboys we first began to read our Thucydides, we met in the very beginning with the story of how rich Athenians wore Golden Grasshoppers (as the schoolmaster calls them) in their hair. These golden ornaments were, of course, no common grasshoppers, but the little Cicadas, whose sharp chirrup seemed delightful music to the Greeks. It is unpleasant to our ears, as Browning found it; but in a multitude of Greek poets, in Alcaeus and Anacreon and all through the whole Anthology, we hear its praise. We have it, for instance, in the Birds:

Though the hot sun be shining in the sky In the deep flowery meadow-grass I lie: To listen to the shrill melodious tune Of crickets, thrilled to ecstasy at noon.

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