Note 14 — Chapter XVII · THE COLLABORATORS

Poor people, what a hard life is yours: honourable above all, but of all the most uncertain! You exhaust yourselves with labour, and when you are almost within sight of its reward a few hours of a cold night, which has come upon you suddenly, have destroyed the harvest. To help these afflicted women would, it seemed to me, be a very difficult task. However, I tried, guided by botany, which recommended me to offer, as a substitute for the mulberry, the plants of related families: the elm, the nettle-tree, the nettle, the pellitory. Their budding leaves, chopped small, were offered to the silkworms. Other experiments, much less logical, were tried according to individual inspiration. None of them succeeded.14 One and all, the newly-born larvæ starved to death. My fame as a quack must have suffered somewhat from this failure. But was it really my fault? No, it was the silk-worm’s, too faithful to its mulberry-leaf.… Larvæ that live on a vegetable diet will not by any means lend themselves to a change of food. Each has its plant or group of plants, apart from which nothing is acceptable.15