also that he ought not, must not, and shall
not have his fill of foreign oysters, because
such a heinous, contraband banquet would be
contrary to every French protectionist
principle. Whatever may be the duty on the
article marked on the Tarif, it is an understood
thing amongst French customs'-officers
that, in order to stimulate and encourage
French fishing-boats, the produce of English
fisheries is to be hindered, hampered,
overhauled, and excluded by every ingenious
impediment and annoyance that ill-will and
jealousy are capable of devising. If not
prohibited by one plain-spoken word, fish is still
prohibited so effectually that any one who
attempts to import it very soon grows sick
of the task.

In this dilemma, what was to be done?
An enthusiastic savant boldly replied,
"Increase the produce of the national
oyster-beds. Undertake, at the expense of the
State, and by the agency of the men and
vessels belonging to the Imperial navy, the
sowing of oysters all along the French
coast, so as to repeople the ruined beds, to
revive those which are threatened with
extinction, to increase those that are in a
prosperous condition, and to create new
ones wherever the nature of the bottom will
permit.''

For once, national selfishness has invented
a means of world-wide benefit. The wizard
who promised to perform the magical feat of
raising up abundance in the midst of dearth
is Monsieur Coste, member of the Institut,
and Professor of Comparative Embryogeny
to the College of France. Oysters are
interesting creatures, whose natural history had
not escaped Monsieur Coste's professional
observation, although it is utterly despised
by the vulgar. Few persons know even what
is the favourite and natural position of an
oyster at the bottom of the sea; they fancy
that it lies with the flat shell upwards,
because they see it so packed in fishmongers'
tubs to keep the liquor in. But the oyster
itself wants to let the liquor out, and to
renew it as often as it can; and so it prefers to
lie with the flat shell downwards, the hollow
shell uppermost serving for a house or dome
to resist the pressure of the water. An
oyster has a will of its own; for if not
attached to a stone or to another shell, and the
angle at which it lies inclined be not too
unfavourable, it will exercise the power of
locomotion, and change to the side it likes best
by a sudden spring or snapping of the valves.
An oyster-pit, in genial weather when the
tide is out, is anything but an inanimate
object to visit. The inmates give unmistakeable
signs of life by spittings and spurtings
and suckings-in of fluid, by gentle openings
or sharp shuttings-to.

Monsieur Coste was cognisant of two
important facts in the oyster's biography. Every
oyster produces not less than from one to
millions of young ones annually. They are
visible to the naked eye, at the time of their
birth, only as the turbid liquor which
constitutes the milkiness of oysters when
they are going out of season. Under the microscope, young oysters are seen to be furnished
with a bivalve shell, like their parent;
they are exceedingly interesting objects, and
especially beautiful when viewed with polarised
light. Prepared specimens are to be
had of Amadio of Throgmorton Street and
other first-class opticians. These myriads of
tiny embryos issue in crowds from the valves
of every mother oyster—and every oyster is
a mother—like swarms of bees rushing from
their hives. But, unlike the bees, they have
no queen to direct their course and decide
upon their final home. Swimming freely,
they are carried away by the tide to
unfavourable spots, are smothered in sediment,
or become the prey of polypi and other
marine animalcule-eaters. Only a very small
proportion indeed find a suitable resting-place,
and grow to the size which fits them
for human food.

But, secondly, if we can arrest and harbour
the young fry before their perilous dispersion
through the wide wide sea, we can solve the
problem of obtaining an almost indefinite
increase of shell fish; and Monsieur Coste
became aware of a means of fixing this
miscroscopic population at the moment of
making its adventurous exodus. The roots
and branches of certain tropical trees (no
doubt the originals which Baron Munchausen's
oyster-trees and cockle-trees were
intended to caricature) are often loaded with
shell-fish, in the case when they dip and
droop into salt-water creeks. This might
have suggested the idea (though it is not so
stated), that by sinking branches of trees
over oyster-beds and in their neighbourhood,
a little before the spawning season, it would
be possible to retain these legions of living
dust at the outset of their journey.
Accordingly, in the month of February, eighteen
hundred and fifty-eight, Monsieur Coste, in a
report to the Emperor, suggested that such a
plan should be adopted; he stated, besides,
the conclusions which led him to assert that
the sea might be put into cultivation, just as
well as the land. The consequence was, that
the Head of the State ordained that the Bay
of Saint Brieuc, on the north coast of Brittany,
should be made the theatre of a first
sowing of oysters undertaken at the expense
of the government, executed by means of
government vessels, confided to the care of
taeir crews, and destined, in case of success,
to serve as a model, along the whole
coastline of France, for the creation of a vast
submarine exploitation—the word deserves
to be naturalised, as it has no English equivalent—
which must prove equally serviceable
to the development of the navy and to the
welfare of the maritime population. Very
lately, Monsieur Coste has addressed a second,
report to the Emperor summing up the