OCR Text |
Show Silkworms of the Sea. Plenty of worms live in the sea, and some of them are very beautiful creatures. Which latter fact ought to be consoling to ourselves, inasmuch as there are naturalists who contend that the earliest ancestor of the human race was a marine worm. But the so-called "silkworm of the sea" the designation being purely figurative and poetical is a bivalve mollusk properly known as the "pinna" and native-to the Mediterranean. Medi-terranean. It spins a silk so beautiful that in ancient days the fiber was reserved re-served exclusively for the weaving of royal garments. This silk is spun by the mollusk to furnish an anchor line by which it fastens itself to a convenient con-venient rock. Tt is extremely fine and very strong. Cleaned, dried and passed through combs, it is reduced to delicate deli-cate threads of a lustrous brownish-yellow brownish-yellow hue, which are woven into gloves, stockings and other articles. A pair of stockings of this material today costs SO. Philadelphia Ledger. |