DOMESTIC SILKS
California may branch out and be come a great silk manufacturing State some day, when it becomes known that her facilities for doing so are much superior to those of most other lands. Mr. Louis Prevost, of San Jose, who has a lot of silk worm eggs and cocoons on exhibition at the Mechanics' Fair, says that in Europe the greater portion of every crop of silkworms get diseased and die, but in this climate they all live and come to maturity - it is impossible for them to become diseased. He also says that here, it is but little trouble, and requires small care and attention to raise silk worms, and that in his department of labor, one man here can perform the work of eight in Europe, and do it with comparative ease. Mr. Prevost gets no opportunity to manufacture California silks, because the demand for his silkworm eggs is so great from foreign countries, and the prices paid him so liberal, that he finds it more profitable to lay the eggs and ship them off than to keep them and hatch them. As fast as the worms produce them, he sends them to Italy, and comes as near filling all orders from there as he can, at twelve dollars an ounce (containing forty thousand eggs.) He has an order from Mexico, now, for five hundred ounces, but he is unable to fill it. They say that a silkworm ranch is one of the few kinds of property in this world that never fail to pay. Let Californians make a note of it, and act upon it.
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