pounds by them, after paying all expenses.
After two good years, there were four successive
years when the oysters almost deserted the
banks; but there was a reappearance of them
last year, and the government want to see
whether the now-favourite art of pisciculture
will come to their aid.

It would, indeed, be a novelty if we could
rear pearls—manufacture them, so to speak, by
coaxing the oysters which produce them. Captain
Phipps, the present master-attendant and
superintendent at Tinnevelly, has a small iron
steamer, the Godavery, a small teak-built
schooner, the Emily, and a still smaller cutter,
the Pearl, at his disposal; with these he subjects
the oyster-banks to a daily examination,
fishing them, or guarding them from other
fishers. Sometimes free trade in pearl-fishing
has been advocated; but this would lead to
an exhaustion of the banks by reckless fishing.
The harvest of chinchona bark in South
America, and that of teak timber in the Malabar
forests, are known to have been injured
by a greedy eagerness to bring as much as
possible to market as quickly as possible—to " kill
the goose that lays the golden egg." Captain
Phipps is trying to guard the pearl-banks at
Tinnevelly from a similar calamity. He wishes
to lay down a nursery of young pearl oysters,
to replenish the banks. He has found a bank
only six or seven feet under water, and here are
his babies. An oblong space is enclosed;
two-year-old pearl oysters are laid down on the bank
within it; blocks of coral or of rock receive the
spawn; and the young oysters from this spawn
are removed to the deep-sea banks in due
season. This removal is necessary, because it
would be impossible to enclose an artificial space
large enough to hold as many grown shells as
are required for a remunerative fishery; and
because it is believed that the quality of the
pearl depends a good deal on the depth and
clearness of the sea in which it is found. It is
during the period of early growth that the pearl
oysters are most exposed to danger on their
native banks; and the nursery system will, it
is believed, ensure to them a much briefer
exposure to such dangers. As a single pearl
oyster sometimes produces as many as twelve
million eggs, there is abundant encouragement
to give a fair trial to the nursery system. The
nursery was stocked, last year, with young
oysters obtained from various banks; and
naturalists are watching the result with some
interest. As the pearl oysters reach maturity in
six years, the plan is that the fishing is not to
take place earlier than this: if the oysters are of
different ages on different banks, an annual
fishery will be ensured; and there will be measures
of conservancy adopted, by frequent
examination of the banks, and weeding out of
everything that is detrimental to the growth and
well-being of the pearl-maker.

Mother-of-pearl lines nearly all the shells even
of our own native oysters. There is a relation
between the pearl and the mother-of-pearl which
naturalists will probably know more about
by-and-by than they seem to know now. Regarded
commercially, there are many points of interest
herein. The mother-of-pearl trade is prodigiously
larger than that of pearls proper, in quantity
if not in value. Birmingham alone finds
employment for two thousand persons in cutting
and working this substance. The quantity
brought over varies from fifty to a hundred
thousand pounds worth annually. Some of the
shells are as large as the crown of a hat; and
sometimes a workman is lucky enough to find
a valuable pearl buried between the nacreous
layers of the mother-of-pearl. The price of the
best shells is from twelve to fifteen pounds per
hundred-weight, and is rising on account of the
briskness of the demand; but those which are
yellowish in colour and deficient in lustre are
purchasable at a much lower rate. It is
among the manufacturing traditions of
Birmingham that, once upon a time, a particular
kind of shell went so utterly out of use as to
have no market-price at all; that a dealer
buried a considerable quantity because he could
not sell them; and that he dug them up some
years afterwards when a change of fashion led
to a demand, and made his fortune. Sheffield,
too, uses an immense quantity of mother-of-pearl,
for the handles of penknives and other
cutlery.

A kind of mussel found on the coasts of the
Highlands yields what are known, as Scotch
pearls; but these have a dull and leaden appearance.
The Chinese have a cunning way of putt ing
little bronze images of Buddha inside a large
pearl-mussel shell; the fish covers the images
with its nacreous coating; and the Chinese then
sell these pearly Buddhas as curiosities. From
these inferior qualities upwards, the gradations
of value are excessively numerous. The Panama
pearls are long and drop-shaped, blackish or
brownish in tint; those of India and Persia
are finer. Unless a pearl is symmetrically
pear-shaped, so as to show all its beauty as a pendent,
the more spherical it is, the higher it is valued.
The price of pearls varies even more rapidly than
that of diamonds. They may be as low as ten
guineas per ounce—they may be as high as ten
guineas per grain; but if they are fine in shape
and quality, and weigh more than a hundred
grains each, there is no cut-and-dried rule for
estimating their worth. The initiated talk
of famous pearls as other connoisseurs do
of famous Raffaelles and Titians; of the
Marquis of Abercorn's great drop pearl; of
the Crown-Princess of Prussia's pearl necklace;
of the still finer one possessed by the
Empress Eugénie; of the costly specimen
presented some years ago to Queen Victoria by
the East India Company. When the French
Directory ordered the crown jewels to be
valued in the early days of the Revolution, one
pearl was set down at eight thousand guineas,
and two others at six thousand each. Philip
the Fourth, of Spain, had a pearl so famous
that it had a name for itself—la Peregrina. The
lmaum of Muscat is credited with the possession
of a pearl worth thirty thousand pounds;