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94 INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION, 1876. facture, as we shall hereafter see, were the germs of the present silk- industry of America. From 1780 to 1820 the domestic culture and fabrication of silk was also pursued to some extent in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and parts of New York, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, but without any results bearing upon the extension of the manufacture, as in Con necticut. About the period of 1825, with the growing sentiment which then prevailed for the extension of American industry, the public atten tion was attracted by means of congressional reports, messages of State governors, and publications by enthusiasts in the press, to the field for American industry which lay open in the silk-culture and fabrication. Among the individuals most prominent as writers and practical experimentists, though with no results profitable to them selves, were Mr. Duponceau, of Philadelphia, and Judge Cobb, of Dedham, Massachusetts. Their appeals found a response in the public mind, dictated by the natural desire to appropriate the most attractive and luxurious of the textile arts, together with a new product for our soil. But the means by which the much-desired industry should be planted were not yet made clear. At an unhappy moment, Dr. Felix Pascalis made known to the public the remarkably rapid growth and supposed excellent qualities of the Morus multicaulis, first planted in the United States in 1826. In place of the old method of planting the well-known and hardy, but slow-growing, mulberry- trees, it was proposed to secure leaves fit for feeding from trees of a single season’s growth, which seemed possible through the extraor dinary luxuriance of growth of the multicaulis variety. The public were taught that every farm should be a nursery for the young trees, that every house should have its cocooneries, and that silk would become as cheap as cotton. At first gradually, and then more and more rapidly, the excitement in regard to the multicaulis grew, until it reached a speculation, whose extent and folly, and the ruin it brought in its collapse, in 1839, are too well remembered to need any further notice. With the subsidence of the multicaulis fever, there came a general decline of interest in the silk-culture, except in Mans field, which had so thoroughly tested the value of the white mulberry as to partake but little of the prevalent excitement. There, however, the mania for speculation, which seems to have been an epidemic of the times, was transferred to the white mulberry. The fever had its course and its reaction. Silk-culture sank into disfavor in the town to which it had given prosperity for nearly seventy years. Finally, in 1844, a blight of a general character, to which even the hardy