Ferdinand von Mueller

Letter not found. For the text given here, see Argus, 7 February 1867, p. 5, under the heading, 'The Acclimatisation Society'. The item is introduced with the following information: 'At the meeting of the Council on Tuesday ... a letter, addressed to Dr. Mueller, was also read from Mr Charles Brady, of Brisbane, stating that the Ailanthus silkworm had been successfully established in Queensland. Mr Brady says:–'

The item was subsequently reprinted in Brisbane courier, 16 February 1867, p. 5, and elsewhere. It is dated to late January as the latest date on which it could have been sent from Brisbane to reach Melbourne in time to be read at the meeting on 5 February.

The quotation is followed by: 'Mr. Brady kindly offers to send a supply of these worms to Melbourne, and concludes by stating that, thus far, the eggs have been found to hatch in the eighth, ninth, or tenth day from laying, and that it is perfectly practicable to maintain a perpetual succession of new brood from day to day throughout the year'.

The published summary of the letter appears to confuse Brady's development of a system of rearing the Mulberry silk moth Bombyx mori with that of his work with the Ailanthus species, Samia cynthia. Kapus (1893) quotes George Bennett, 'writing in 1870':

Mr Brady has, by special culture of varieties of mulberries during the springs, summers, autumns, and winters of more than three whole years, succeeded in raising successive small crops of silk from annual mulberry silkworms daily for a period of upwards of 1000 consecutive days.

Brady (1868), his pamphlet on the Ailanthus silkworm, makes no mention of this achievement. In 1872 he was granted land on the Tweed River to cultivate mulberry to establish a silk industry based on Bombyx mori. He exhibited silk from that estate at the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London, saying in an accompanying circular (Wood (1887), p. 337) that

the climate on the Tweed River furnishes the mulberry tree in great abundance, yielding daily supplies of the leaf from the end of July until April … The whole of the natural history of the mulberry silkworm, absolutely unchanged in its annual habit, is in view at one and the same moment, worms hatched on the day itself, and of every other day's, from one day old to full-grown ones, actually making their cocoons; the moths emerging, and new eggs being produced, which are a generation to proceed with in a subsequent season. Arranged beforehand, and in the hands of a skilled person, the process is as much under control as the machinery in a factory. It is animated, self-reproducing machinery, maintained by supplies of the silkworm's only natural food—the mulberry leaf.