listing pictures, antiquities and sundry singular items that may have formed part of a collection put together by Browne but were more likely products of his imagination, the inventory of a treasure house that existed purely in his head and to which there is no access except through the letter son the page. In a short prefatory note to an unknown reader, Browne compares this "Musaeum Clausum" with the Musaeum Aldrovandi, the Musaeum Calceolarianum; the Casa Abbellita at Loretto, and the repositories of the Emperor Rudolf at Prague and Vienna, all of them famed collections of his day. Among the rare books and documents in Browne's "Musaeum" are King Solomon's treatise on the shadow cast by our thoughts, de Umbris Idearum, previously reported to have been in the library of the Duke of Bavaria; a collection of Hebrew epistles, which passed between the two most learned women of the seventeenth century, Molinea of Sedan and Maria Churman of Utrecht; and "a Sub Marine Herbal" describing in exhaustive detail all that grows on the mountain ranges and in the valleys under the sea, the many kinds of algae, corals and water ferns never seen by man, sargassum borne along by tropical currents, as well as whole islands of plants drifting from continent to continent in the path of the trade winds. Browne's imaginary library further includes a fragment of an account by the ancient traveller Pytheas of Marseilles, referred to in Strabo, according to which all the air beyond Thule is thick, condensed and gellied, looking just like sea lungs, and moreover a poem by Ovidius Naso, hitherto supposed lost, written in the Getick language during his exile at Tomi and found wrapt up in wax at Sabaria, on the frontiers of Hungary, where there remains a tradition that he died in his return towards Rome from Tomi, either after his pardon or the death of Augustus. Apart from all manner of other curiosities, Browne's museum has in it a drawing in chalk of the great fair of Almachara in Arabia, which is held at night to avoid the great heat of the sun; a painting of the famous battle fought between the Romands and the Jaziges on the frozen Danube; a dream image showing a prairie or sea meadow at the bottom of the Mediterranean, off the coast of Provence; Solyman the Magnificent on horseback at the siege of Vienna, and behind him a whole city of snow-white tents extending as far as the horizon; a seascape with floating icebergs upon which sit walruses, bears, foxes and a variety of rare fowls; and a number of pieces delineating the worst inhumanities in tortures for the benefit of the observer: the scaphismus of the Persians, the living truncation of the Turks, the hanging sport at the feasts of the Thracians, the exact method of flaying men alive, beginning between the shoulders, according to the meticulous description of Thomas Minadoi. Occupying some undefined position between the natural and the unnatural is also a fair English lady drawn al negro, or in the AEthiopian hue excelling the original white beauty, with the motto: "Sed quandam volo nocte nigriorem". In addition to such astonishing writings and artworks, the Musaeum Clausum also contains medals and coins; a precious stone from a vulture's head; a neat crucifix made out of the crossbone of a frog's head; ostrich and humming-bird eggs; bright-hued parakeet feathers; spirits and salt of Sargasso excellent against the scurvy; extract of cachundè or liberns employed in the East Indies against melancholy; and a glass of spirits made of aethereal salt, hermetically sealed up, of so volatile a nature that it will not endure daylight, and therefore shown only in winter, or by the light of a carbuncle, or Bononian stone. All of these things are recorded by Browne the doctor and naturalist in his register of marvels, all of these and many more that I do not propose to list in this place, excepting perhaps the bamboo cane in which, at the time of the Byzantine Emperor Justinianus, two Persian friars who had long been in China to discover the secrets of sericulture had brought the first eggs of the silkworm over the Empire's borders into the Western world.
The silkworm moth, Bombyx mori, which lives in white-fruited mulberry trees is a member of the Bombycidae or spinners, a subspecies of the Lepidoptera which, together with the Saturnidae, includes some of the most beautiful of all moths — the Kentish Glory, Endromis versilcolor, the Great Peacock, Bombyx atlas, the Large Ermine, Harpyia vinula and the Emperor moth, Saturnia pavonia. The fully developed silkworm moth, however, is an unprepossessing creature measuring a mere one and a half
inches across and an inch lengthways. Its wings are ashen white with pale brown stripes and a crescent-shaped, often barely perceptible mark. The only purpose it has is to propagate. The male dies soon after mating. The female lays three to five hundred eggs over the course of several days, and then also dies. The silkworms that hatch from the eggs, an encyclopaedia dating from 1844 informs me, are enrobed in a black, velvety fur when they enter this world. During their short lives, which last only six or seven weeks, they are overcome by sleep on four occasions and, after shedding their old skin, emerge from each one re-made, always whiter, smoother and larger, becoming more beautiful, and finally almost completely transparent. A few days after the last sloughing one can notice a redness on the throat, which heralds the onset of metamorphosis. The caterpillar now stops eating, runs about restlessly, and, seeking to leave the low earth behind, strives to gain greater heights, until it has found the right place and can start to weave its cell from the resinous juices produced in its insides. If one slits open a caterpillar that has been killed with ethyl alcohol along the length of its back, one sees a cluster of intertwined small tubes that resemble intestines. They end by the mouth, in two very fine orifices, through which the juices pour forth. During its first day of work, the caterpillar spins an extensive, disorderly, fragmented web which is used to secure the cocoon. And then, constantly moving its head back and forth and reeling out an uninterrupted thread almost a thousand yards long, it constructs the actual egg-shaped casing around itself. In this shell, which admits neither air not moisture, the caterpillar changes into a nympth by sloughing off its skin for one last time. It remains in this state for two to three weeks in all, until the butterfly described above emerges. — The Silkworm's native habitat seems to include all those Asian countries where the white mulberry trees grow in the wild. There it lived in the open, left to its open devices, until man, having discovered its usefulness, was prompted to foster it. Chinese history notes that, two thousand and seven hundred years before the beginning of the Christian calendar, Huang Ti, the Emperor of the Earth who reigned for more than a century and taught his subjects how to build wagons, ships and grain mills, persuaded his first wife, Hsi-ling-shi, to attend to the silkworms, to devise trials for their employment, and increase, by means of this her especial task, the happiness of the people. Hsi-ling-shi thereupon took the worms from the trees in the palace garden and into her own care, in the imperial apartments, where, protected from their natural enemies and the unpredictable and often inclement spring weather, they thrived so well that this marked the beginning of what was later to be developed into domestic silkworm culture. Together with the unravelling of the cocoons and the weaving and embroidering of the materials, this was to become the principal occupation of all the succeeding empresses, and passed from their hands into those of the entire female sex. Promoted in every conceivable way by those in authority, the rearing of silkworms and the production of silk had, in the course of a few generations, taken such an upturn that the name of China came to be synonymous with an inexhaustible wealth of silk. Chinese merchants traversed the length and breadth of Asia with their silk-laden caravans, taking some two hundred and forty days to travel from the Chinese sea to the coast of Mediterranean. Because of this enormous distance, and also because of the horrific punishments awaiting those who disseminated the knowledge of sericulture beyond the borders of the Empire, the fabrication of silk was restricted to China for thousands of years, until the two aforementioned friars with their hollowed-out walking staffs arrived in Byzantium. After the raising of silkworms had become established at the Greek court and on the Aegean islands, it took a further millennium for this elaborate form of husbandry to pass via Sicily and Naples to Piedmont, Savoy and Lambardy, where Genoa and Milan soon flourished as the European centres of silk cultivation. Within half a century, the art of silk-making had reached France from northern Italy, thanks to Olivier de Serres, who is still considered the father of French agriculture. His manual for landowners, published in 1600 under the title Théatre d'agriculture et mesnage de Champs, which went through thirteen printings in a very short space of time, made such a deep impression on Henry IV that he summoned him to Paris, offering him copious honours and favours, to be his first counsellor, on a par with Sully, his prime minister and minister of finance. De Serres, who was reluctant to surrender the management of his own estates to someone else, demanded one favour as a condition for accepting the office he had been offered: that the cultivation of silk should be introduced in France, and that to that end the native trees in the royal gardens throughout the country be uprooted and mulberry trees planted in their stead. The king was enthralled by de Serres' plan, but before it could be put into practice he had to overcome the resistance of Sully, whom he normally held in high esteem and who opposed the idea of producing silk, either because he genuinely considered it the height of folly or because he saw in de Serres a rival in the ascendant.