sidered as the labor of queens. They soon
discovered that it was impracticable to transport the short-lived
insect, but that in the eggs a numerous progeny might be preserved and
multiplied in a distant climate. Religion or interest had more power
over the Persian monks than the love of their country: after a long
journey, they arrived at Constantinople, imparted their project to the
emperor, and were liberally encouraged by the gifts and promises of
Justinian. To the historians of that prince, a campaign at the foot of
Mount Caucasus has seemed more deserving of a minute relation than
the labors of these missionaries of commerce, who again entered China,
deceived a jealous people by concealing the eggs of the silk-worm in a
hollow cane, and returned in triumph with the spoils of the East. Under
their direction, the eggs were hatched at the proper season by the
artificial heat of dung; the worms were fed with mulberry leaves;
they lived and labored in a foreign climate; a sufficient number of
butterflies was saved to propagate the race, and trees were planted
to supply the nourishment of the rising generations. Experience and
reflection corrected the errors of a new attempt, and the Sogdoite
ambassadors acknowledged, in the succeeding reign, that the Romans were
not inferior to the natives of China in the education of the insects,
and the manufactures of silk, in which both China and Constantinople
have been surpassed by the industry of modern Europe. I am not
insensible of the benefits of elegant luxury; yet I reflect with some
pain, that if the importers of silk had introduced the art of printing,
already practised by the Chinese, the comedies of Menander and the
entire decads of Livy would have been perpetuated in the editions of the
sixth century. A larger view of the globe might at least have promoted
the improvement of speculative science, but the Christian geography was
forcibly extracted from texts of Scripture, and the study of nature was
the surest symptom of an unbelieving mind. The orthodox faith confined
the habitable world to _one_ temperate zone, and represented the earth
as an oblong surface, four hundred days' journey in length, two hundred
in breadth, encompassed by the ocean, and covered by the solid crystal
of the firmament.

IV. The subjects of Justinian were dissatisfied with the times, and with
the government. Europe was overrun by the Barbarians, and Asia by the
monks: the poverty of the West dis