Michel, and from Saint Vaast, Courseul, Etretat,
Dieppe, and Tréport, along the Norman coast;
Dunkirk and St. Malo also produce good
oysters, and presently, as the least known
among the various ways of dressing them, I
shall give the receipt for that practised at the
picturesque old Breton town. The green oyster
is peculiar to France, and comes from the coast
of Brittany, but both the colour and the flavour
of this kind can be produced by putting oysters
into pits where the water is almost three feet
deep in the salt marshes, and where the sun has
great power. In these pits they become green
in three or four days, a result proved by M.
Borg de St. Vincent to be the effect of light.
All oysters are fond of shallows and sequestered
nooks, where the waters above them are still and
undisturbed by violent winds, and their lives—
until the supreme hour arrives when they are
wanted for the table—would be tranquil enough
were it not for the crabs, which make terrible
havoc amongst them when they catch them
gaping. Equally fatal to the oyster is sand,
but to this danger it is only exposed in " parks,"
the natural haunt of the oyster being a hard
rocky bottom. Michelet, who takes all animals
under his protection, thus speaks of the oyster,
which he describes (without respect to gender)
as its own architect, whose dwelling, he says, is
but the continuation of its own mantle of flesh,
following its forms and tints. "All that the
inert oyster—to which the sea brings nourishment
— requires, is a good box with a hinge,
which it can open when the hermit wishes to
feed, but which it suddenly closes if it fears that
it may itself be fed upon by some greedy neighbour.
That greedy neighbour, par excellence—
near enough now by railway—is the Parisian
who refuses to dine without having first offered
up, to his own appetite, a sacrifice of oysters.
The central depot for his necessity—the Paris
Billingsgate, in fact— is in the Rue Montorgueil,
and a recent calculation shows that, in the year
1860, the market price of the quantity sold
amounted to upwards of sixteen hundred and
forty-one thousand francs, which, at the rate of
four francs and a half the gross, gives a
"consommation" of fifty-two millions five hundred
and twenty-three thousand four hundred and
ninety-six oysters, and the retail sale by the
écalières was estimated at more than two
millions of francs. Of course the Parisians eat
more oysters now than ever, but that they were
up to their work in this line, a passage from the
Almanack des Gourmands, of M. Grimod de la
Reynière, will convince us: " Let us," he
says, " enter the Rue Mandar" (it runs into the
Rue Montorgueil), " and we find ourselves
hemmed in between two famous rocks, against
which are dashed and wrecked every day the
purses of the dainty lovers of green and white
oysters, we mean the rocks of Cancale and
of Etretat. It is there you eat, at all hours,
the best oysters in Paris. So prodigious is the
quantity consumed, that shortly their shells
alone, reaching to the eaves of the highest
houses, will themselves become rocks of the
most formidable description." The famous
"Rocher de Cancale," I am sorry to say, exists
no longer, but en revanche, at Philippe's, at the
corner opposite, you may begin the best dinner
to be had in Paris with oysters as fine as ever
came from Cancale or the Marenues. A propos
of these last, they are to be met with, not only
at the restaurants of Bordeaux, but at every
town of note on the Garonne, as far as it is
navigable towards the Pyrenees, and there are
few pleasanter things for a traveller to fall in
with on board the steam-boats than a bevy of the
wandering oyster-sellers of La Rochelle. They
are a class apart, whom you may at once recognise
by their singular square head-dresses and
black cloaks with pointed hoods. They come
chiefly from La Tremblade and other islands
near La Rochelle, and travel in the autumn
with oysters and sardines, settling themselves
for the season at all the populous places on
the great Gascon river, and receiving fresh
supplies of their highly-vendible wares about
twice or three times a week. They sit at the
hotel doors, just as you see them near the
restaurants in Paris, but in good looks they far
exceed the écalières of the capital, and many of
them do justice to their loved airs with very
beautiful voices. Not only as ostreophagists,
but as naturalists, the French have devoted
themselves to oysters. Buffon, Cuvier, De
Blainville, all their great names in science, have
gone thoroughly into the history of the
captivating mollusc. M. de Lamarck names no fewer
than forty-eight different kinds, all of them eatable.

The geographical and gastronomic distribution
of the Ostraceæ is well enumerated in a
little book specially dedicated to the subject,
and recently published by Trübner and Co.

Wherever found, the enormous importance of
the Oyster family as the benefactor to Man can
never be over-estimated. On the Georgian
seaboard of America it actually saves thousands of
human beings from a watery death. Dr.
Carpenter, in his Zoology, tells us that the Oyster
plays, amongst its other many parts, the part of
a breakwater. " A remarkable growth of them
exists along the alluvial shores of Georgia, in
North America; and their influence in preventing
the encroachments of the sea is very important.
The marsh land extends inwards for a
space of from twelve to eighteen miles; and it
is so soft, that an iron rod might be pushed into
it without difficulty to the depth of eighteen or
twenty feet. A great number of large creeks
and rivers are found meandering through these
marshes; and the bends of these rivers would
in a short time cut through the adjoining land
to such an extent, that the whole seaboard
would become a quagmire. But wherever the
tide directs its destroying force, its effects are
counteracted by walls of living oysters, which
grow upon each other from the beds of the
rivers to the very verge of the banks."

A few words now about dressing Oysters,
though your true ostreophagist will not hear of
them sophisticated. " Quel est le barbare,'