Free Translator Free Translator
Translators Dictionaries Courses Other
Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Silkworm   Listen
noun
Silkworm  n.  (Zool.) The larva of any one of numerous species of bombycid moths, which spins a large amount of strong silk in constructing its cocoon before changing to a pupa. Note: The common species (Bombyx mori) feeds on the leaves of the white mulberry tree. It is native of China, but has long been introduced into other countries of Asia and Europe, and is reared on a large scale. In America it is reared only to small extent. The Ailanthus silkworm (Philosamia cynthia) is a much larger species, of considerable importance, which has been introduced into Europe and America from China. The most useful American species is the Polyphemus. See Polyphemus.
Pernyi silkworm, the larva of the Pernyi moth. See Pernyi moth.
Silkworm gut, a substance prepared from the contents of the silk glands of silkworms and used in making lines for angling. See Gut.
Silkworm rot, a disease of silkworms; muscardine.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Silkworm" Quotes from Famous Books



... derived from Kirman Pers.worms because the silkworm is supposed to have been bred there; but the name is of far older date as we find the Asiatic Aethiopians of Herodotus (iii. 93) lying between the Germanii (Karman) and the Indus. Also Karmania appears in Strabo and ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton

... methods, defends colored people, objects to their treatment by Friends, 39; likes women preachers, criticises uncle for drinking, describes medical practice, 40; criticises reception to Pres. Van Buren and scores him, 41; silkworm culture, remembrances to family, 42; school closes, small wages, school "bully," excursions of olden times, first proposal, studies algebra, can make biscuits also, 43; teaches in Cambridge and Ft. Edward, let. to ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper

... the Indian grass was entertaining. I am no angler myself; but inquiring of those that are, what they supposed that part of their tackle to be made of?—they replied, "Of the intestines of a silkworm." ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White

... studies are based on the same principles which guided me in my researches on wine, vinegar, and the silkworm disease— principles, the applications of which are practically unlimited. The etiology of contagious diseases may, perhaps, receive from them an ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various

... known it? Thou frequently regardest that to be beneficial which is really injurious; that to be certain which is really uncertain; and that to be desirable and good which is undesirable and not good. Alas, why dost thou not awake to a correct apprehension of these? Like a silkworm that ensconces itself in its own cocoon, thou art continually ensconcing thyself in a cocoon made of thy own innumerable acts born of stupefaction and error. Alas, why dost thou not awake to a correct apprehension of thy situation? No need of attaching thyself to things ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... from his shadowy springs Sweet waters shake a trembling sound, There flit the hoot-owl's silent wings, There hath his web the silkworm wound. ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare

... The silkworm has long been known to be subject to a very fatal and infectious disease called the Muscardine. Audouin transmitted it by inoculation. This disease is entirely due to the development of a fungus, Botrytis Bassiana, in the body of the caterpillar; ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... our work on earth—of necessity, of labour, of love, or of duty,—like the silkworm that spins its little cocoon and dies, we too depart. But, short though our stay in life may be, it is the appointed sphere in which each has to work out the great aim and end of his being to the best of his power; and when that is done, the accidents of the flesh will affect ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles

... fine plane-trees make the town attractive; but the public buildings, the chief of which are the church of St Jean, a heavy building of the 18th century, and the citadel, which serves as barracks and prison, are of small interest. Pasteur prosecuted his investigations into the silkworm disease at Alais, and the town has dedicated a bust to his memory. There is also a statue of the chemist J. B. Dumas. Alais has tribunals of first instance and of commerce, a board of trade-arbitrators, a lycee and a school of mines. The town is one ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... it as he walked. His wings were white with the salt that had settled on them from the spray of the sea. His tail was long and thick and jointed and white, and had little legs to it, any number of them—far too many—so that it looked like a very large fat silkworm; and his claws were as long as lessons and as sharp ...
— The Book of Dragons • Edith Nesbit

... de Cordonnet, had watched and studied the work of the silkworm, and had long thought that there ought to be some simpler process of spinning silk than the tedious and complicated method employed by ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 35, July 8, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various

... chemistry in regard to atoms and molecules are not less reckless than the speculations of the Hindoo imagination. "Physicists have determined the volume of a molecule, and referring to the numbers that they give, we find that a cube, a millimeter each way (scarcely the volume of a silkworm's egg), would contain a number of molecules at least equal to the cube of 10,000,000—i.e., unity followed by twenty-one zeros. One scientist has calculated that if one had to count them and could separate in thought a million per second, it would take more ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot

... either tree or bush. The only products of Assyria which acquired such note as to be called by its name were its silk and its citron trees. The silk, according to Pliny, was the produce of a large kind of silkworm not found elsewhere. The citron trees obtained a very great celebrity. Not only were they admired for their perpetual fruitage, and their delicious odor; but it was believed that the fruit which they bore was an unfailing remedy against poisons. Numerous attempts were made to naturalize the tree ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson

... is, then, as I feared!—But shall that English silkworm presume to beard me in my father's house, and in the presence of Mary Avenel?—Give me to meet him, spirit—give me to do away the vain distinction of rank on which he refuses me the combat. Place us on equal terms, and gleam the stars with what aspect they will, the sword of my father shall ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott

... life, tend to reappear in the offspring at the same period; for instance, in the shape, size and flavour of the seeds of the many varieties of our culinary and agricultural plants; in the caterpillar and cocoon stages of the varieties of the silkworm; in the eggs of poultry, and in the colour of the down of their chickens; in the horns of our sheep and cattle when nearly adult; so in a state of nature natural selection will be enabled to act on and modify organic beings at any age, by the accumulation ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin

... In the silkworm (fig. 1) the silk is produced by certain peculiar structures, tube-like in shape, known as the silk-glands. The silk is created in a liquid form in the inside of the silk-gland, and, becoming mixed with a ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various

... believed to be only a fiction, intended to hide the truth and enhance the value of the new Coan material. But it is now ascertained that some of the wild silk in China is carried by the silkworm round the trees, wrapping them up, as it were, in large, untidy cocoons; so that, as usual, tradition had ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford

... mulberry-leaves, and then spin for themselves a silken shell, and fall into a long sleep inside of it. She watched her mother spin off the fine silk and make it into neat skeins, and once she rode on her mother's back to market to sell it. You could gather mulberry-leaves, and set up these little silkworm boxes on the windowsill of your schoolroom. I have seen silk and flax and cotton all growing in a pleasant schoolroom, to show the scholars of what linen and silk and cotton ...
— The Seven Little Sisters Who Live on the Round Ball - That Floats in the Air • Jane Andrews

... could not be placated until a shrine was built in its honour; that in the time of the Emperor Kogyoku, the people of the eastern provinces devoted themselves to the worship of an insect resembling a silkworm, which they regarded as a manifestation of the Kami of the Moon; that the Emperor Keiko (A.D. 71-130) declared a huge tree to be sacred; that in the days of the Empress Suiko (A.D. 593-628), religious rites were performed before cutting down a tree supposed to be an incarnation of the thunder ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... there has been a considerable effort to extend and improve the production and manufacture of silk, and the result has been very favourable. The silkworm, formerly confined, in a great degree, to Valencia and Murcia, is now an article of material importance in the wealth of the two Castiles, Rioja, and Aragon. The silk fabrics of Talavera, Valencia, and Barcelona are many of them admirably wrought, and are sold at rates which ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey

... not a significant sign from her husband stopped her mouth. The chief, without vouchsafing her the smallest attention, unfastened the pelisse of grey fox skin, stripped it off, and then proceeded to divest the infant of the first of the coats in which it was enveloped, like a silkworm in its cocoon. But when, after having with some difficulty accomplished this, a third, fourth, and fifth wrapper appeared, he seemed suddenly to lose patience, and drawing his knife, he, with one cut, ripped the whole of the child's clothes from its body, and handed it over stark ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various

... made Easy, says, "A silkworm's web being examined, appeared perfectly smooth and shining, every where equal, and much finer than any thread the best spinster in the world can make, as the smallest twine is finer than the thickest cable. A pod of this silk being wound off, was found to contain 930 yards; but it is proper to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 381 Saturday, July 18, 1829 • Various

... Inoculation against small-pox, typhoid, and cholera was made compulsory; and we find that the Turkish Ministers of Posts, of Justice, and of Commerce, figureheads all of them, have Germans as their acting Ministers. In the same year a German was appointed as expert for silkworm breeding and for the cultivation of beet. Practically all the railways in Asia Minor are pure German concerns by right of purchase. Germany owns the Anatolian railway concession (originally British), with right to build to Angora and Konia; the Bagdad railway concession, with preferential ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson

... silkworm is not exactly in place in a chapter on Novel Live Stock. It is at present not much more than an interesting experiment, but there will be money in silkworm culture as soon as a market for the product is developed. The main difficulty is lack of food, as the worm thrives ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall

... the proper working of the great terraqueous machine, and we shall have as eloquent pleas in defence of the mosquito, and perhaps oven of the tzetze-fly, as Toussenel and Michelet have framed in behalf of the bird. The silkworm, the lac insect, and the bee need no apologist; a gallnut produced by the puncture of a cynips on a Syrian oak is a necessary ingredient in the ink I am writing with, and from my windows I recognize the grain ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh

... thing is endowed with energy, indeed, but this does nothing of itself but from Him who implanted it. Examine any other earthly object, like a silkworm, bee or other small creature. View it first naturally, then rationally, and at length spiritually, and if you can think deeply, you will be astounded at all you see. Let wisdom speak in you, and you will exclaim in astonishment, "Who does not see the divine in such ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg

... 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 ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various

... gentle stage of improvement set in. Times grew better in Hannibal after those first two or three years; legal fees became larger and more frequent. Within another two years judge Clemens appears to have been in fairly hopeful circumstances again—able at least to invest some money in silkworm culture and lose it, also to buy a piano for Pamela, and to build a modest house on the Hill Street property, which a rich St. Louis cousin, James Clemens, had preserved for him. It was the house which is known today ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... prodigious system of relations which it carries like a measuring-rod into the world and lo! everything in experience submits to be measured by it? What pre-established harmony is this between the spinning cerebral silkworm and ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... a highly comic account of the chasse of this species of gibier. He has a good deal to say about the sardine and tunny fishery, about the fruit and scent traffic, and about the wine industry; and he gives us a graphic sketch of the silkworm culture, which it is interesting to compare with that given by Locke in 1677. He has something to say upon the general agriculture, and more especially upon the olive and oil industry. Some remarks upon the numerous "mummeries" and festas of the inhabitants lead ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett

... wreck, he knew not how many, but he was sure of one—a little maid with hair like the unwound cocoon, so that they called her the Daughter of the Silkworm. It was about her that the chief struggle was. She had fallen to the lot of Ben Yakoub, who had been chestnut-gathering by the sea at the time of the wreck; but when he arrived on Mount Couco the Sheyk Abderrahman had claimed her and hers as the head of the tribe, ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge

... sea of asphalt, where Broadway and Fifth Avenue flow together. Up Broadway he turned, and halted at a glittering cafe, where are gathered together nightly the choicest products of the grape, the silkworm and the protoplasm. ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry

... meaning of the piece. But while we find it often used- of the ancestral temple, it may also mean any building, especially one of a large and public character, such as a palace or. mansion; and hence some contend that it should be interpreted here of 'the silkworm house.' We are to conceive of the lady, after, having gathered the materials for sacrificial use, then preparing them according to rule, and while it is yet dark on the morning of the -sacrificial day, going with them into the temple, and setting ...
— The Shih King • James Legge

... its mess. The cabbage Pieris consumes the pungent leaves of the Cruciferae as the food of her infancy; the Silkworm disdains any foliage other than that of the mulberry-tree. The Spurge Hawk-moth requires the caustic milk-sap of the tithymals: the Corn-weevil the grain of wheat; the Pea-weevil, the seeds of the Leguminosae; the Balaninus (A genus of Beetles ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre

... until it is somewhat advanced in age. It contains in every part a milky juice, which will coagulate into a sort of Indian rubber, and this has been thought to give tenacity to the filament spun by the silkworm. ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie

... lie with you to-night. Your silkworm used to fast every third day, and the next following spins the better. To-morrow at night, ...
— The White Devil • John Webster

... bird. It should, however, always be eaten with chip potatoes and bread sauce, and not in the company of cold lettuce. Those who insist on the English method of serving it should quote the learned Freeman, who, when confronted with the Continental alternative, complained bitterly that he was not a silkworm! ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo

... in Vaucluse in 1860, had diminished to eight, representing a loss of millions of francs. The vineyards have also been reduced, owing to the inroads of the phylloxera, although not in equal proportion. Even the silkworm, the third chief source of wealth here, ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... church, dedicated to Saint John; than which the traveller may voyage long, and meet nothing worthier his notice. He visited the ancient armoury—dined at the palace, and at the different messes—inspected the laborious travailings of the silkworm at the boschetto—conversed with the original of Byron's Leila—a sweet creature she is!—looked with wondering eye on the ostrich of Fort Manuel—and heard the then commandant's wife relate her tale thereanent. He went ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman

... in connection with buried sutures of unabsorbable materials, such as silk, silkworm gut, or silver wire, it is apt to persist till the foreign material is cast off ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles

... the Six Days' Works; and among the various buildings appropriated to this institution, he describes a gallery destined to contain the statues of inventors. He does not disdain to place in it not only the inventor of one of the greatest instruments of science, but the discoverer of the use of the silkworm, and of other still more humble contrivances for the comfort of man. What place would Lord Bacon have assigned in such a gallery to the statue of Mr. Watt? Is it too much to say, that, considering ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie

... glimpses seen as through a lift of fog. Gas shell, musty with chloroform; sweet-scented tear shell that made your eyes run with water; high bursting shrapnel with black smoke and a vicious high explosive rattle behind its heavy pellets; ugly green bursts the colour of a fat silkworm; huge black clouds from the high explosive of his 5.9's. Day and night the men worked through it, fighting this horrid machinery far over the horizon as if they were fighting Germans hand-to-hand—building up whatever it battered down; buried, some of them, not once but again ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean

... use firearms. They used banknotes and bills of exchange long before other nations, and the modern adding machine is founded upon a principle which has been used by them a thousand years. They discovered the process of rearing the silkworm and they dressed in silk when our forefathers wore clothing made of the skins of animals. The writer has crossed the Atlantic more than a dozen times on ships with watertight compartments, a so-called modern safety device, but the Chinese had watertight compartments in their junks hundreds ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols

... my other actions, so will I be in this. My vengeance shall fall upon myself, as the person most culpable of all, for I ought to have considered how ill this girl's fifteen years could assort with my threescore and ten. I have been like the silkworm, which builds itself a house in which it must die. I do not reproach you, misguided girl"—here he bent down and kissed his still insensible wife—"for the persuasions of a wicked old woman, and the wheedling tongue of an amorous ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... are bursting and the eaves on the mulberry-trees are beginning to develop, will you go with the Empress Dowager or the Empress into a temple on Prospect Hill, between the Coal Hill and the Lotus Lake, where she offers sacrifices to the god of the silkworm and prays for a prosperous year on the work of that little insect? Above it stands one of the most hideous bronze deities I have ever seen—male and naked—in a beautiful little shrine, every tile of which is made in the form of a Buddha's head. ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland

... fattish boy with whitey-brown hair, and he was as soft and white as a silkworm. Billy did not admire him. He himself was hard and brown, with thin arms and legs and joints like the lumps of clay on branches that the gardener has grafted. And Harold ...
— Oswald Bastable and Others • Edith Nesbit

... brought with him a large quantity of silkworm seed, but all failed, save about half an ounce; the commissioners determined at once to erect a filature, which should be a normal school to the whole province, and it was their opinion that it would be "a sufficient nursery to supply, in three or four years, as many reelers as will be wanted, when ...
— Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe • Thaddeus Mason Harris

... there are tomes of morality of the purest sort. Even in the later additions to the epic one reads: "Away with gifts; receiving gifts is sinful. The silkworm dies of its wealth" (xii. 330. 29). One should compare, again, the exalted verse (Buddhistic in tone) of ib. 321. 47: "The red garment, the vow of silence, the three-fold staff, the water-pot—these only lead astray; they do not make for salvation." There were doubtless good and bad ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins

... contempt for the worm that makes the angler fix it on the hook, and observe with complacency that the vivacity of its wriggles will attract the bite. If the worm could but make the angler respect, or even fear it, the barb would find some other bait. Few anglers would impale an estimable silkworm, and still fewer the anglers who would finger into service ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... that silk is made by the silkworm. This worm feeds on the leaves of the mulberry tree. In the south of France there are thousands of mulberry trees. There are also ...
— Highroads of Geography • Anonymous

... of war, the telephone is as indispensable, very nearly, as the cannon. This, at least, is the belief of the Japanese, who handled their armies by telephone when they drove back the Russians. Each body of Japanese troops moved forward like a silkworm, leaving behind it a glistening strand of red copper wire. At the decisive battle of Mukden, the silk-worm army, with a million legs, crept against the Russian hosts in a vast crescent, a hundred miles from end to end. By means ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson

... to. If I could, I would stay here much longer with our good friend Martha. She is better than anybody I know except my mother, and she takes care of me as if I were a silkworm." ...
— Cornelli • Johanna Spyri

... your own nature, are they then so pleasant, so captivating? Have you not renounced many of your beautiful gifts—your pleasure in literature and music—nay, in short, what is the most lovely part of life, in order to bury yourself in concealment and oblivion, and there, like the silkworm, to spin your own sepulchre of the threads which another will wind off? You bow your own will continually before that of another; your innocent pleasures you sacrifice daily either to him or to others: are you so very happy ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer

... there were several hundreds of apricot trees in bloom, which presented the appearance of being fire, spurted from the mouth, or russet clouds, rising in the air. Inside this enclosure, stood several thatched cottages. Outside grew, on the other hand, mulberry trees, elms, mallows, and silkworm oaks, whose tender shoots and new twigs, of every hue, were allowed to bend and to intertwine in such a way as to form two rows of green fence. Beyond this fence and below the white mound, was a well, by the side of which stood a well-sweep, windlass and such like articles; the ground ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin

... long pinnate leaves, which appear to connect it with the walnuts and hickories. This is the ailanthus, a large tree which you have often seen in the village, and which used to be popular as a shade-tree. It is very clean-looking, for the only insect that will eat its leaves is the silkworm." ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church

... trade in wild silk (i.e. from the oak-leaf silkworm) is in truth an important branch of commerce in Kwei-chau. But the chief seat of this is at Tsuni-fu, and I do not think that Polo's route can be sought so far to the eastward. (Ann. de la Prop. XXXI. 136; ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa



Words linked to "Silkworm" :   genus Bombyx, Bombyx, silkworm seed, caterpillar, Samia cynthia, silk gland, giant silkworm, domestic silkworm moth, silkworm moth, giant silkworm moth, serictery, family Saturniidae, wild wilkworm, ailanthus silkworm, sericterium, Saturniidae



Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com